The Nintendo Switch Is Not Outdated

Within about two minutes of starting up any game on my Nintendo Switch, the internal fan usually starts screaming at me. When the shouting starts, there's an easy solution - I press the home button and give my console (a review unit that I've been playing games on regularly since just before the system launched in 2017) a little break. I'll take a beat and look over my recently played games on the Switch home screen, thinking about how the UI is unchanged since the day I got it - a bit bare, yes, but it gets the job done (and does not lag as I scroll through my games the way many of my other consoles have by the end of their life). After a few seconds, the noise stops. I resume my game. My aging console does not complain further. 

As a big ol' nerd with a vested interest in keeping on top of all the big releases, I have all three of the major consoles and a powerful gaming laptop. I use the PS5 often, and the Xbox Series X gets dusted off when I receive review code for it or a cool new game hits Game Pass. These consoles are still (in my mind at least) new and flashy, and it feels like their generation of games has been hitting its stride lately, with more developers crafting experiences that feel like they couldn't have worked as well on the PS4 and Xbox One.

But the system I'm most excited by, day by day, is still my Nintendo Switch. It's the console I play the most often. It has the most games that I like. And even after seven and a half years - which feel like they have flown by - the system still feels fresh and exciting to me, and it's receiving the best "late life" support a Nintendo system has ever had. I don't think it's controversial to call this my all-time favourite console. 

With a Switch successor almost certainly on its way next year, though, I've noticed a growing impatience among many folks online. For a few years now people have been calling the Switch outdated, underpowered, even, in some extreme cases, obsolete. They played Tears of the Kingdom and wondered what it would be like on a more powerful system. They ponder a world where the Switch can run Elden Ring, or even the aging GTA V. For a lot of people, the Switch 2 feels overdue and necessary - for a few years, at least, until the desire for a third Switch will take over. 

The older I get, the more wary I am of this line of thinking. I've had this feeling many times - the sense that the system I'm still enjoying needs to be replaced because technology is marching ever forward. More often than not it wrecks my enjoyment of the thing I have more than it improves my experience with the new thing once it releases. 

Don't get me wrong -  I will definitely buy the next Switch, and I expect I'll get a lot of joy out of it and appreciate all the things it can do. I am not saying that you, or I, shouldn't do that, and I will probably be excited for it once it's revealed.  But I am tired of the way the inherently capitalist drive towards brighter, shinier objects has impacted the way we approach games and the systems that house them. I hate the way a term like "underpowered" gets treated like an objective fact rather than a subjective value judgment. A system that is not as powerful as some of the others on the market is not obsolete. It's just a different system.

Games marketing has always focused on power. A new console will unlock new possibilities, not previously possible. More immersive worlds, better graphics, controllers that rumble in new, more tactile ways! The games you loved two years ago? They are garbage now. And the games you're enjoying right now on your PS5? Good luck playing them once the PS5 Pro comes out, knowing that someone out there is experiencing slightly smoother leaves on their distant trees. The best way to sell you on new technology is to tell you that what you already have isn't good anymore.

A system that is not as powerful as some of the others on the market is not obsolete. It's just a different system.

But the Switch really has been something else. Incredible first-party support from day one, a phenomenal collection of indie gems, cool ports of older games, and many, many games that are perfectly suited for portable play. A console with 1,000 times the power is not going to produce a superior  version of Emio: The Smiling Man, or give the Phoenix Wright series a better home. No one is going to remaster Celeste, or Balatro, or Undertale to take full advantage of the next system's RAM increase. If you can buy a system today and can immediately purchase and start playing dozens of the best contemporary games ever made - on your TV, but also in bed, on a plane, even in the toilet - then how outdated is that system, really? 

The Switch continues to sell extremely well - the figures in Japan each week are astonishing - but more importantly, there is still a more or less constant flow of great games being released. By the end of the year, Nintendo will have published 11 new Switch games in 2024 - four remakes, one remix-of-sorts (Nintendo World Championships), and six completely new games, including a few curveballs and dormant franchises. By modern standards, that's a huge number! Not all of them were total bangers, but there were options, different genres being explored, new entries in huge, great series. By the end of the year, Sony will have published six new titles, one of which was Concord. Xbox Game Studios, which has sold its first-party titles as a key selling point of Game Pass, has four. 

I am not saying that Nintendo is better than Microsoft and Sony - that's not an interesting line of thinking to me. But just looking at the numbers, it's clear that working for an older, less "powerful" system has the advantage of letting you pursue different goals. It means that development times can be kept shorter, and games can cost a little less money (in Australia a new first-party Switch retail game generally retails for about AU$40 less than a new PS5 title). It means that you can work within extremely well-defined constraints and produce games that fit within those boundaries. I do not need to relitigate what the past two years have looked like for the games industry, or why games that are more accessible to audiences and cost less to develop might be good. 

If you can buy a system today and can immediately purchase and start playing dozens of the best contemporary games ever made - on your TV, but also in bed, on a plane, even in the toilet - then how outdated is that system, really? 

The Switch also just works. Its updates are not disruptive. Its games rarely need huge day one patches. The unchanging UI might be plain, but it also means that I know where everything is. The fan whirrs, the battery is maybe a little worse, and there's one small scratch on my screen, but otherwise this is fundamentally the same system it always was. It's not creaky, it's not laggy, and the influx of good games never ended. Sure, it can't run everything, but I've never felt like it needed to. There's no single console that has every game; if you stick to a single system you're going to have to accept compromises, no matter what. My personal backlog of Switch games that I still want to get to is extremely, intimidatingly long, and it's not going anywhere once a new system launches.

So, look, yes, I'm going to buy the next Nintendo console on day one. Unquestionably. But if day one is in 2028, I can't say I'd be bothered. If it's 2030, sure. If Nintendo came out and said "actually we are just going to keep making Switch games forever", I'd clap my hands and resolve to buy an OLED model if my launch system ever dies. I will want the new system because it's where I'll be able to play all of Nintendo's new games, but I do not believe that there is a technological imperative for the new system to exist. I don't think the Switch is not powerful enough to be a good video game system in the year 2025. 

Video game advertising and rhetoric has always convinced us that we need to look forward, to imagine the next technological step. Our appreciation of the art is so tied into a sense of "look at what the new system can do". But it's becoming more and more clear to me that the focus on what's around the corner often comes at the expense of enjoying what we have now, grousing about these apparently disastrous frame rate drops in the new Zelda game because it's easy to imagine that a newer, shinier system might make the game run a little better, that the next release is the one that is finally going to make video games, the media many of us have loved for our entire lives, good. But that's no way to live. It's like Yeats said: what disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb.