Topic: Does anyone else feel like this is more "Switch U" than Switch 2?

I do criticize some things about the Switch 2, but based on everything I've seen with the recent Direct and all that, I am of the opinion that we are nowhere even close to a game drought right now, and will never be, as long as games keep coming out at the current pace and there's a decent amount of new games like what is happening right now and going into 2026.

@ShieldHero I'm gonna say, I know we live in a low attention span era but come on.

You don't want a consoles entire lifetime of games in a year. They'll cannabalise each other.

Plus, and let's be clear here, who has that money? Really? You wanna be buying a new full price game in major franchises every....week? Fortnight? Because the current cadence of monthly to fortnightly by this holiday is already a bit much for those of us with full time jobs and lives to not only afford but even play.

I mean, this was the post a few pages back:

And we've since had Prime confirmed as December, Kirby November, Age of Imprisonment November

For me I'm sitting here thinking.... Tears of the Kingdom will keep me going until Hades 2 later this month. I have it early access on Steam, I haven't played it for a bit waiting for release, Switch 2 seems the platform I want to play it on. Then Mina the Hollower is next month with the option of Legends Z-A if I want but I'll probably skip. I don't consider Galaxy 1 & 2 as worth it for that price so skipping that. Then November is Kirby Air Riders and December is Prime 4

And then after that, early next year is kinda stacked

@Haruki_NLI Read what I said again.

Filter it down to the actual Switch 2 exclusives and you just have MKW, Banaza, and then nothing until November. The games you're counting are the smaller gap-fillers, not the actual main events.

And if you filter out the Wii U ports and multiplatform releases on Switch the first year was Arms, Odyssey and Splatoon 2 until what'd be the equivalent to the March here. What's your point?

The Wii U early on was just Wii U, there weren't Wii games coming out, there weren't cross-platform releases, there was no DLC. It was pretty slim pickings to find much of anything to play on Wii U until probably 9 months after launch. Really the best Nintendo platform output during that period was on 3DS, which obviously was of no benefit to people who wanted something to play on Wii U. The current state of Nintendo platform releases compatible with Switch 2 at this point, it's not even remotely close to that

As I said, I have a game a month here I could pick up. Certainly more than that in some of these months. I'm not going to get all of these. Back on the Wii U for me it was like.... Nintendo Land, New SMB U, Assassin's Creed 3 and the Rayman Legends demo. Then I picked up Need for Speed Most Wanted in March (which would be the equivalent of November for Switch 2). Then the next game I got for it was Pikmin 3 in July which brings us into the equivalent of like March.....

..... to say that this is kinda like Wii U in terms of what's available to play just seems hyperbolic and a bit detached from reality

@Bolt_Strike I envy your life if having all this cash burning a hole in your pocket and all this free time to want that many games is what you don't like about Switch 2.

This ain't the Wii U. Mario Kart World isn't $90, the system can do raytracing and modern games. Yes it has ports, yes it has remakes. Yes it has enhancements with new content. Yes it has new games.

One day, maybe when I'm dead, people can enjoy hardware for what it is.

The one comparison to the Wii U I will take is this: it sucks being even associated with playing Nintendo hardware right now, culturally.

There's no "killer app" for me to buy the Switch 2 at this point. Mario Kart World comes close, but eh. There's not enough content to it for me to buy an entire console. The Wii U had a similar situation where the only thing that was worth playing on it was Splatoon. Nothing I've seen yet has made me need a Switch 2. They're releasing the game I'm waiting for (Tomodachi Life) on the Switch anyway so why shell out for a new console? The thing that would make me actually need a Switch 2 would be a mainline Splatoon game or an Animal Crossing game but those seem a bit far away.

@SykoMuffin I think that's a good example of why Switch 2 is not like Wii U. People are not rejecting or ignoring it, simply waiting until later if they're not sold yet. Not everyone wants it now which is valid, but it almost certainly will keep enough momentum that when e.g. animal crossing comes out in 2027 or whatever a ton of people who had been waiting for animal crossing will buy one.

@FishyS Interestingly that wasn't the case for me. I was in the situation of not being sold yet for the Wii U and never really was. I was waiting more for games like a sandbox 3D Mario, BotW, and Prime 4 on Wii U and none of those came within the Wii U's lifespan (BotW did come to Wii U, but was delayed to cross-gen so I ended up skipping Wii U and getting it on Switch). That being said, I don't expect something similar to happen with the Switch 2 where certain major IPs/genres simply never come. Nintendo has a good idea of which IPs and genres sell, and I suspect many if not all of them will get new, original entries at some point (I am questioning if Smash 6 will be on Switch 2, but that's about it and at a bare minimum we should still see Ultimate S2E soon). I don't think the Switch 2 will die in 4 years like Wii U, so even with the droughts we're seeing those IPs should still make it at some point.

I fully agree!!!

@OmnitronVariant

I haven't played MKW, but why wouldn't DKB count? It's quite obvious that Switch 1 couldn't have handled its destruction and particle physics (i.e. its main gameplay mechanic), and the developers have explicitly said they were designed for Switch 2's improved hardware.

@Polvasti It comes down to both games having started development back in 2017, just after the Switch 1 was released. I think people are reading a bit too much into that, though.

It's not like they spent the entirety of the intervening period making a Switch 1 game and only bolted on a few things at the last minute. Rather, they've been targeting the Switch 2 for at least the past four years.

By the same token, you might call Metroid Dread a DS game, because that's what it originally was before getting thoroughly redesigned into a Switch one.

not really. the Wii U was a bit of a confusing mess that wasn't marketed well to the point many people thought it was just an add on for the Wii where as the Switch 2 is exactly what it says it is the next Switch

so i got exactly what i was expecting, a better more powerful console that is the next version of the Switch just like when you see the PS5 you know exactly what it is, the next PlayStation, the next generation

Exactly. If they had called it the Wii 2, then it would have been a lot more clear marketing wise and the console would have sold better.
Because the Wii U was exactly that. A Wii 2 with full backwards compatibility to Wii and the Wii 2 having a new Gamepad with screen accessory.

To be fair, very few games do that and not for anything essential. I think people would be extremely annoyed if a bunch of Switch 2 games started requiring a mobile app. I would argue that the BotW/TotK app stuff would have been better if they could have added it to the main game you could get to through the menu but since it's just an add-on people didn't care much. Fundamentally, screens in two different places are kind of annoying to use for people with only one set of eyeballs.

One assumes that the N64 controller and Wii U gamepad were partially made for Nintendo's second sales line aimed at 3-handed 4-eyed aliens.

@FullbringIchigo but that doesn’t fit with what was actually happening at the time

All the casuals couldn’t get enough of the Wii brand. Drawing tablets, exercise mats, balance boards - anything and everything with the Wii brand was hot.

So what changed?

And when those people brought the new Mario, the new Mario kart, the new smash bros, Mario Maker, zelda and other big games and found out they couldn’t play them on their regular Wii, what happened?

Or do you think Nintendo fans sat out for several years ignoring those big new Wii U games?

@Bass_X0 What changed was mobile took off. Smartphones were a better fit for casuals because they could do more than just play video games on it, there was an entire entertainment package of movies, music, internet browsing, social media, etc. They didn't need to rely on Nintendo for their gaming fix anymore.

@Bass_X0
Yea, @Bolt_Strike nailed it: the Wii Sports crowd had moved over to phones and tablets and stuff like that. Seems a bit too simple, but that's kind of it.

Maybe Wii U would have roped over some Wii grandmas and grandpas if it had launched with Wii Sports 2 or something like that, but it was trying to be a core gaming console under the super-casual Wii nameplate. Just didn't jive.

I loved the Wii U, personally, but everyone knew that thing was dead in the water even before its first birthday. A pretty spectacular failure, really. If Nintendo didn't have the 3DS at the same time, I don't know what would have happened.

Also the main selling points of the Wii U wasn't actually the tablet. Even to the extent that it was, people who wanted a tablet would just get an iPad or use their phone. No, the main selling points of the Wii U were the jump to HD and remote/symmetrical play. Neither of which captured the attention of that more casual audience. These were core gamer audience features but they tried selling them to the wrong audience

Even in that first reveal trailer, the big hype moment was someone coming in to someone playing New SMB and saying the game is on. So the first person goes "ok" and swaps to playing on the GamePad. Which is cool and is certainly how I used it, how I often used portables before, and how I still use portables. But this isn't a selling point to that Wii expanded audience and New SMB was a bad game to pick here to sell to enthusiasts. And the Wii U era was just filled with these kinds of missteps

The HD jump, the other but, was kinda similar. The casual audience didn't care, the more dedicated audience cared. But by 2012 being HD wasn't particularly interesting, the only reason it mattered at all was that now Nintendo was HD. But in the minds of most Nintendo wasn't moving forward here, they were just bringing their hardware up to the new minimum standard. Nice, sure, but not hype inducing

You could argue the Switch 2 is similarly incremental here and doing little more than bringing Nintendo's hardware up to the new minimum standard. I would agree. But the difference is:
1. They have games, and the right games
2. They're not trying to sell it to a casual market who doesn't care

Switch 2 having a Switch 2 edition of BotW, TotK and soon Prime 4 all early on. That immediately sells what the Switch 2 is to the right audience better than anything did on Wii U in that first year or so. And they're actually marketing these games

I often played my wii u games on the gamepad rather than take over the whole TV so I might loosely watch a film and also play the wii u at the same time. It was often useful for content on the TV that I didn't need to 100% concentrate on and to be honest I use the Switch the same way. Yes you could take the Switch on your travels where as the wii u you couldn't but there were some parallels in use for me.

I tried to work out a rough passmark cpu score for the wii u by using the original gamecube vs original xbox cpu comparison and then scaling up the performance for 3 cores and the faster mhz and by some quirk the passmark score worked out at 600 which is the same figure for the original Switch. So the wii u and Switch roughly speaking are in the same ballpark area for CPU performance. The Pentium 3/Celeron chip in the original xbox is about 50% more powerful in performance by Mhz compared to Gamecube. The Pentium 3 does have passmark CPU results. The wii u gpu is 176 Gflops and well documented. The Xbox 360 had a 6 thread 3 core powerpc cpu at 3.2Ghz so providing very good performance for that generation. Well above wii u and Switch performance levels. The PS3 when you take into account the cell processors as well as the powerpc central CPU has more CPU performance than PS4 and Xbox One but of course an incredibly weak GPU in comparison. I guess nothing beats the generational leap from wii to wii u though, 12 gflops GPU to 176 gflops. 15x the performance increase plus the it still had the wii GPU internally which powered the gamepad screen when not emulating the original wii.