I think Nintendo is dancing into dangerous territory here. I have a feeling this thing is going to be loaded with anti-features here specifically designed to curtail modding, piracy, and even unlicensed peripherals. The games themselves are going to get HD re-re-eleases and Nintendo will charge you full price again for the moderate upgrade.
How is that tradition? It happened one time. Successor name suffixes and prefixes used: super, color, advance, mini, 64, i, 3, new, u. It could be anything.
Edit: ah no, there was also super game boy, I guess that's the only one they repeated. But that was specifically for super NES compatibility.
Do "i", "mini" and "new" really count as new consoles? i and new were just upgrades to the same console, I believe, and I'm not sure what "Mini" was even for..
How about the Swiitch? You get the roman numeral 2 in there and the name's similar enough to the original Switch, so customers will be confused as to whether this is a new console or an iteration of the current one. Just like the Wii U!
A message from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, posted this morning to social media platform X, confirms we'll hear of Switch 2 "this fiscal year" - before the end of March 2025.
But the message also damps down any expectation we'll hear about Switch 2 in the next few months - as Furukawa rules out any further details being shared in an upcoming Nintendo Direct scheduled for June.
Furukawa wrote. "We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.
"We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation."
That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone now. They could likely grab a bunch of sales by coming out with a higher-powered system alongside a cheaper version, because many people would like to play games at higher than 25 fps.
Keep in mind, underpowered hardware means lower price, which means more sales. It worked with the Wii, it worked with the Switch. I fully expect people to bitch about the Switch2 being underpowered, using "ancient" stuff from 2020-21
Maybe they'll actually upgrade the hardware to be half decent on this thing, if they want to discourage piracy, make better shit. If I want to play any switch games currently, I'll just pirate them and play it on the steam deck.