Yes, believe it or not, it's been a full month since the launch of the Switch 2 - it's certainly been a busy few weeks. Now that the dust has settled, let's take a look back at how the long-awaited console came out of the gate, from the perspective of Nintendo, players, and media...
Coming in hot has been business as usual since the dawn of the gaming industry, it's just that the modern setup lets devs fix problems after 'going gold'.
Depressing as it is as a player, 'ship first, patch later' is the norm and these days that goes for hardware, too. Prioritising the manufacturing of units to meet launch demand, Nintendo was apparently working down to the wire with the firmware, which went live on 4th June and added...well, everything.
Obviously, this approach ensures that nothing's going to leak, right? Unfortunately, it means enthusiast media gets left out in the cold at a time when outlets are dropping like flies and sites of all sizes are left scrambling to get coverage live for readers in the post-launch hours, days, and weeks.
'Suboptimal' is a polite word I find myself using a lot these days, and everyone on the NL team — and at gaming outlets everywhere — has done an incredible job over the past month. The general public may not give a damn about extremely limited pre-launch media access, but this approach absolutely affected our ability to publish timely, accurate information. Questions that could have been asked and answered weeks or months before got stirred into the launch frenzy, leading to confusion on all sides that could have been avoided.