Nintendo announced Tuesday that Nintendo Switch software “will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch,” according to a post from Nintendo’s corporate X account. The post, attributed to Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo, also confirmed that Nintendo Switch Online will also be offered on the new console.
As previously reported, the Switch 2 has a card slot. However, the tweet doesn’t confirm the new Switch will be able to play physical Switch games. It’s also unclear if players will be able to bring their digital libraries across to the new console using the Nintendo Account system. The message from Nintendo says, “Further information about the successor to Nintendo Switch, including its compatibility with Nintendo Switch, will be announced at a later date.”
Backward compatibility was considered a make-or-break feature for the Switch 2. Although strongly rumored, there remained doubts that Nintendo would be able to pull it off if the new machine’s chip architecture was very different, or if third-party publishers objected. The Switch itself was not backward compatible with any previous Nintendo consoles, and Nintendo made a mint from Switch rereleases of earlier games, such as the selling 63 million copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
But consumer expectations around backward compatibility have changed since Steam normalized the idea of a persistent digital library of games that works across multiple devices. In particular, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are both fully backward compatible with their predecessors — something that could not be claimed for PS4 and Xbox One. In this landscape, a console without backward compatibility would have been a tough sell for Nintendo, especially considering that it has sold over 140 million Switches.
