The Nintendo Switch 2 should see a fair amount of ports and support if its performance will indeed be in the ballpark of the Xbox Series S, but things may drastically change once next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft are out.
Speaking during the latest episode of Moore’s Law is Dead’s Broken Silicon podcast, Taylor Christensen and Jacob Sutton, co-founders of the Spirit of the North series development team Infuse Studio, discussed the next Nintendo gaming system and if it will give the same troubles many developers had porting games to its predecessor. Jacob Stutton said that if the leaked specs are real and the console’s performance is comparable to the Xbox Series S, this generation’s lowest common denominator, the system should see a fair amount of support and ports. Since current generation multiplatform games have to target the Microsoft console, developers won’t have to make huge sacrifices to get their games running on the Nintendo Switch 2.
This, however, is eventually going to change in the future. As with every recent Nintendo hardware, the Switch 2 is launching in the middle of the current generation, and its specs are likely not going to be high enough for smooth porting once the next-generation systems from Sony and Microsoft are out. This happened with the original Switch as well, as the console has trouble running Unreal Engine 4 games without massive sacrifices and is obviously incapable of running Unreal Engine 5 games. In addition, Jacob Stutton highlighted that throwing more hardware doesn’t magically solve other issues, such as software being unable to take full advantage of a system’s specification, making the example of the Unreal Engine 5.4 update, which only recently introduced better multicore utilization leading to potentially much better performance.
The Nintendo Switch 2 has yet to be officially revealed. We will update you on the system as soon as more information comes in, so stay tuned for all the latest news.