Or: Not Another Switch 2 Update Post! Yes, I’m Afraid So.
Indeed in this hardware-dominated gaming year January, April, and June each provided relevant, compelling reasons to talk about Nintendo’s newest headline magnet, and at the beginning of this month the Switch 2 officially passed its three-month anniversary on the market. Yes, we’ve already lived through an entire financial quarter with this thing, and more besides. All the games dated in the big April Nintendo Direct have been released, more have been announced and/or given dates, the calendar for the rest of the year is set, and we have a pretty good feel for the current strengths and weaknesses of the console.
I don’t really have much of a personal stake in extolling the pros or eviscerating the cons of the Switch 2 at the moment. As that mammoth June article covered, it’s a rather straightforward upgrade over the Switch 1, and almost all my friends who had the last console already own its successor. I am, however, morbidly curious about tracking the 2’s market presence against that famously back-against-the-wall version of Nintendo that pulled out all the stops way back in 2017, and maybe throwing in an update on some developments that weren’t exactly obvious on release weekend. Time to dive back in, then.
Who Wore It Better? Switch Launch Year Face-Off
If there’s one thing the first Nintendo Switch was notorious for getting right, it was the pitch-perfect release schedule stretched across its now-legendary first year on the market. So naturally any close follower of the industry would be mighty excited to compare the first year of any would-be successor, as directly as possible. Naturally, he writes, as he squirms uncomfortably in his chair. So uh, yeah, let’s do that.
Nintendo’s eighth generation has begun. The previous one lasted a gargantuan 98 months and two days, and it was very very important to the fortunes of the company, but it has finally run its course, and now here we are at the end of the successor’s long maiden weekend. The Nintendo Switch 2 is in our hands, and tons of people around the world have begun to put it through its paces, proverbial microscope at the ready.
If you think I’m not one of those people, you must be new here. Welcome!
Party Platform
Over the last four days I have played the Nintendo Switch 2 at five different locations, in ten different groups of people, online, offline, on TVs, propped up on cafe tables, in bed and on public transport. No matter what conclusions you may draw from the rest of this rather large article, it remains worthwhile to mention that this is still Nintendo’s competitive advantage in 2025; they do wide-demographic multiplayer better than any other major platform holder, and they do it in a myriad of different ways. The Switch 2 is just as flexible and even more social than its trailblazing older brother, and just in case that conclusion gets lost in all the nerdy minutiae to come, it goes right up here at the top of the page.
Hardware? I Hardly Know Her
Now let’s get straight into the needlessly granular hardware observations and comparisons you all know and tolerate.
The Switch 2 is definitely a nice bit of kit out of the box, and the first thing I noticed is something I hadn’t heard any preview explicitly mention: the dominant colour of the machine. When assembled in handheld mode, this console presents a clean, unified visual that’s a far cry from the middling greys of the Switch 1’s short-lived launch joy-cons, which only made the thick black bezels of the 2017 model stand out even more. The Switch 2 may technically still be on the darker side of the grey spectrum if you want to be a giant nerd about it, but for all intents and purposes this handheld is black, and it looks good in it.
It’s also large, though the box in which it ships is somehow noticeably smaller than even the already-shrunken OLED box. The roughly 8-inch screen and significant power/battery jump up from the first Switch necessitate a wider frame, though the Switch 2 really doesn’t feel as big – or heavy – as it looks; that’s probably down to a remarkably thin breadth. No portable PC handheld I have tried – and I’ve tried a fair few – is even close to this narrow, and that helps with the weird illusion of lightness despite the screen size. It’s only when you look down its edges and notice how tiny all the buttons and compartments are – with the notable exception of the relatively giant lower air vents – that the size hits you again.
As for the screen itself, pros and cons are undeniably in play. All the pre-release hubbub about the Switch 2 lacking an OLED panel will almost certainly prove irrelevant to the vast majority of people, as the LCD technology Nintendo uses has come on in leaps and bounds in the last six years. The 1080p screen is much more comparable to the one on the Playstation Portal remote player this site dissected last year, both in size and vibrance. In the picture below, you can see some classic light bleed around the edges of the Switch Lite that isn’t there on the 2. However, it’s still undeniable in person that the Switch OLED (not to mention the AyaNeo Air handheld PC also covered in that 2024 article) runs rings around the launch Switch 2 as far as black levels, contrast and even brightness are concerned.
The biggest immediate difference from the Switch 1 beyond stature is the magnetic attachment mechanism behind the new joy-cons, and they do indeed jump on with a satisfying clap. The magnet on each edge is strong enough to feel like it takes over control once the “Joy-Con 2s” are inside the colour-coded divots, yet weak enough that you can’t, say, attach the two components from within their plastic bags right out of the box. At least in week 1, my Switch 2 isn’t showing any signs of loose or bendy joy-con connection; everything feels almost like one piece in handheld mode.
Well Nintendo, you’ve done it again. You’ve successfully, shall we say, been Nintendo.
It’s been an insane weekend for the Japanese videogame giant. The curtain is now (mostly) up on the tremendously exciting Nintendo Switch, the home console that can also be played as a portable (Not the other way around, as Nintendo seems very keen to emphasise). And the general complexion of the reveal event was very, very different to what the seemingly endless supply of corroborating rumours and prediction videos would have us believe. For all the credible leaks from credible sources about specific games and features that may very well still ring true, the big Tokyo event still managed to be an almost complete surprise both in its general content and where it decided to put its focus. If “Switchmas” had been right about what we were expecting, it wouldn’t have quite felt like a Nintendo show. We Nintendo fans as a general group have a habit of forgetting that, but for better or worse, the Big N was more than happy to throw us a few reminders. This is a company that does not like being predicted, but as it turns out, even the collective power of the internet’s most well-connected sleuths couldn’t quite spoil everything. And in true Nintendo fashion, said surprises have divided the internet right down the middle.
I could go through the whole presentation bit by bit and talk about my thoughts on each individual revelation (I’ve watched the whole thing twice now, plus the entire five-hour Treehouse stream that followed half a day later and countless YouTube hands-on reactions), but there’s a better way to do this.
. – Nintendo’s Modern Console –
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The raw processing specs of the Nintendo Switch remain elusive in any sort of official capacity, though I have every reason to believe that Eurogamer’s December leak will turn out to be a fairly decent approximation. That leaves us with a console that’s more capable when sitting in its dock/outputting through the TV than when played on the go, but only as long as we’re talking about display resolution and theoretically (though hopefully not) frame rate. In it’s weakest configuration, we can expect it to be more powerful than the Wii U – that much is supported by the impressions coming out of the public-facing events of the last two days – but even at it’s strongest, it’s almost certainly going to come off weaker when compared to the standard Xbox One and PS4 models. That means the biggest triple-A third party releases will probably be skipping the Switch, unless it really takes off sales-wise and it becomes worth the extra financial investment to port down. It also means Nintendo’s first party games will continue to look amazing, and just about every big indie hit you can think of should be able to make it over to the Switch, uncompromised and fully portable. Ditto for the vast majority of Japanese RPGs and such. Swings and roundabouts, time will tell etc. .
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What’s much more concrete – and refreshing, it must be said – is just about every other Switch hardware detail that has come to light over the last few days. The system will not be region locked (there are no words for how happy this makes me), it has a 6.2 inch, 720p capacitive touch screen (i.e. multi-touch, like the PS Vita or a smartphone), supports the current standard 802.11ac Wi-Fi spec, allows up to 8-player local wireless interaction, charges via super-fast USB-C – which is only just now becoming widespread on Android phones – and supports expanded memory via the reasonably cheap and easy-to-find Micro SDHC/Micro SDXC cards (At least up to 256gb according to one moment during the Treehouse stream, which would have been more than enough to fit everything I’ve ever bought on the Wii U). Its battery life is quoted as being between 2.5 and 6 hours depending on the game you’re playing, which is about what we could have expected; certainly not enough to last an international flight, but coupled with that USB-C charging port, it should easily be juiced enough to cover your daily work commute no matter what you’re playing. This is all very good news if you ask me, especially when combined with the generally premium look and – based on what I’ve read so far online – the feel of the system. This is a sleek, modern device.
Vagrant Rant 