Although Nintendo has no plans to replace the Nintendo Switch anytime soon, it has admitted that it’s working on a successor - hinting that it could bean all-new consolerather than the much-rumouredSwitch Pro. However, this could prove unfortunate for those who have accrued 100s of Switch games over the years.
That’s because renowned YouTuber and developer,ModernVintageGamer, believes that a shift to more powerful, incompatible components could lead to issues with backward compatibility: “If Nintendo is to move away from the Tegra X1, which we all feel strongly that they will probably do, current Switch games won’t work on new hardware, that is without recompiling the games to target that hardware,” he said in his latest video (as reported byVGC).
Shifting the main processing chip could mean that each developer would have to go back to their former games to build in compatibility - and that’s traditionally something that many of them aren’t willing or cannot afford to do. Just take Xbox backward compatibility as an example. While hundreds ofXbox 360 and original Xbox games were made compatiblefor Xbox One and, ultimately, Xbox Series X/S, thousands more were not. Even though the Xbox One system used emulation.
That could be a route Nintendo takes too, but it would depend on the Switch 2 (as it’s currently being termed) having a considerably more power processing chipset than the currentSwitch OLED model.
ModernVintageGamer also suggests that Nintendo could include a Tegra X1 chip alongside any new CPU, which would be used solely to ensure that current Switch games can be run without issues. But, that will make a new console considerably more expensive, we’d imagine.
For us, it really depends on whether Nintendo wants a literally Switch 2 or Switch Pro, or if it plans to introduce something altogether different. If it’s the latter, you are more likely to get a whole swathe of remasters and reissues (again) rather than true backward compatibility.
One good bit of news is that theSwitch Onlineretro games library is more than likely to be transferred regardless, says MVG.
