Nintendo positioning Switch 2 as simply a bigger and better follow-up to Switch 1 is damaging to the company’s brand identity.
That’s according to former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida, speaking on the Easy Allies podcast, who has shared his thoughts on Switch 2 in general, and Nintendo’s recent hardware reveal.
Yoshida’s point is that Nintendo has always done different when compared to competitors, and designed its consoles around fun concepts – motion controls, or hybrid handheld/TV gameplay – rather than simply focusing on more technical oomph.
With Switch 2, however, Yoshida says Nintendo has focused more than ever on making a straightforward upgrade to its best-selling current console, with the central premise of being both a handheld device and a home console unchanged.
“I have to be polite, I wanted to be polite,” Yoshida began, noting that he had taken part in a livestream reacting to the Switch 2 reveal, and had initially been careful with his words.
“Something I didn’t say there,” he then continued, “to me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo. In a sense I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion.
“For me, they’re always about creating some new experience, like designing hardware and games together to create some new experience. But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right?
“It’s a larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120fps. They even had their hardware person starting the stream as other platforms do!
“And because it’s a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is – ‘we made things better’. And that’s something other companies have been doing all the time.”
Yoshida reacted coolly to the third-party games shown running on Switch 2, also, noting that while many were popular – such as Cyberpunk 2077, or Elden Ring – they were also pre-existing games from the past console generation.
“Of course it’s a more powerful Switch, so it’s great if your gaming was only on Nintendo hardware,” Yoshida continued. “It’s the first time for you to play amazing games like Elden Ring. But for us, like, the core gamers, who own multiple hardware and play games on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, the games they showed off – especially from third parties… In theory it’s amazing to have all these all-stars of industry games on Nintendo hardware, however what they showed were like… oh.”
Yoshida went on to acknowledge the games Nintendo showed that used the Switch 2’s camera peripheral and mouse controls, including Nintendo’s wheelchair basketball game Drag X Drive (“that’s very Nintendo, I was very excited”) but suggested that the focus on just being a better Switch was very much Nintendo’s main focus.
“I was personally a bit disappointed because they didn’t disappoint everyone,” Yoshida said. “Because everyone wanted that better Switch in Switch 2.”
Eurogamer’s Ed Nightingale recently went hands-on with Metroid Prime 4: Echoes on Switch 2 to try one of the console’s new features – its mouse controls – and see how they fared compared to a standard gamepad setup.