Nintendo’s new era: looking back at the Switch and ahead to the next generation

With the Switch 2 launch days away, analysts and consumers are watching to see how well Nintendo can follow-up the best selling home console in its history. Judging from the pain of trying to secure a Switch 2 pre-order, it seems like Nintendo has nothing to worry about – at least at launch.

Down the line, however, concerns about tariffs, a steadily rising cost of living, and a saturated market might cast a shadow on the Switch 2. The Verge talked to analysts, journalists, and normal video game playing people to put the Switch 2 launch in perspective. The key takeaway? While the console will assuredly have another blockbuster debut, its future looks much less certain.

Though the first Nintendo Switch era of Pokémon games was undeniably rocky at times, it brought the series’ trading and organization systems into a new level of maturity. It wasn’t always easy to complete Pokédexes in remakes like Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and new entries like Sword and Shield. But those games helped The Pokémon Company create a more seamless way to move your monsters from one title to another, or swap them with friends. And with the Pokémon franchise about to make its big debut on the Switch 2 with the cross-generation game Pokémon Legends: Z-A, it feels like The Pokémon Company is getting ready to take the trading system to the next level.

In the Pokémon games, filling up your Pokédex has always been an exercise in patience, planning, and understanding that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company want you trading with other players rather than trying to catch ’em all on your own. The games’ trading mechanics evolved as the series jumped from the Game Boy to new hardware. By Generation IV (the DS games), players could swap monsters remotely over the internet without needing to use wired link cables. And after years of many legendary and mythical pokémon only being obtainable through in-person events, The Pokémon Company and Game Freak used Pokémon’s Generation V to introduce a serial code redemption system that made snagging super-rare monsters infinitely easier.

Tiger Borgia, a content creator focused on cozy games, has been pulling weeds in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for over five years.

Given the current landscape in which game developers constantly release new updates to vie for the attention of audiences, Borgia’s dedication to New Horizons can come across as admirable. Nintendo has not released a major update to New Horizons since the Happy Home Paradise DLC in 2021. (Just this week the game was patched in advance of the Switch 2.) The version of New Horizons Borgia plays today — the one where she pulls weeds and fishes each day — is more or less the same game that the company released in the spring of 2020.

The first several months after Nintendo released the Switch in 2017 have been described as a “gold rush” for independent game developers. The Switch’s eShop wasn’t exactly barren, but early on there was a lot of room for new releases. To put it into perspective, Nintendo announced in 2018 that around 1,000 games were added to the platform in its first year or so. The number of games released each year just adds to the number of games available on the eShop; in 2024, GameDiscoverCo reported that 50 games were added per week, leading to more than 2,300 new games in 2024 by November.

What started as a gold rush for indie developers slowly spoiled, and eventually the eShop became overrun with slop. This pushed some developers to the margins, while platform degradation soured the experience as a whole.

The Nintendo Switch is on the cusp of becoming Nintendo’s bestselling hardware ever. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why: it’s a device that seamlessly transitions from a home console to a handheld, erasing the distinction between the two. It’s been so successful that Nintendo isn’t changing all that much with the Switch 2. But both consoles are well-executed versions of ideas Nintendo has been working on since the failed Wii U — and maybe even earlier.

Purely by sales numbers, the Wii U was a flop. The Switch has sold more than 150 million units in its eight-year lifetime. The Wii U, by comparison, sold 13.56 million units — less than a 10th of what the Switch did — making it Nintendo’s worst-selling home console.

Nintendo is entering a new era. While most everyone associates the company with video games, for the last few years the brand behind Mario has been steadily expanding itself into something much larger.

“I think people view Nintendo as a gaming company, but we have always thought of ourselves as an entertainment company,” Nintendo’s senior managing executive officer, Shinya Takahashi, told me in 2023. Design legend Shigeru Miyamoto echoed the same idea at the opening of Nintendo’s first museum last year. “What I wanted to express with this museum is that we are first and foremost an entertainment company,” he said.