Nintendo has held its latest financial call with investors to discuss the last quarter. In a Q&A session during the event, Nintendo was asked about a successor to the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo announced at the event that the Nintendo Switch is now its best-selling home console ever with 103 million sold. The Switch has now surpassed the Nintendo Wii’s sales and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Nintendo also announced that 98 million people played on a Nintendo Switch console last year.
When asked about how the company would keep those 98 million players for its next console, the company had this to say. “Into 6th year of Switch and we are maintaining momentum, we are looking at how to expand and grow this 100m users, leading into next gen device.” If Nintendo is planning to “expand and grow” the current users with the Nintendo Switch 2, that very much sounds like backwards compatibility is on the table.
Nintendo has traditionally supported backwards compatibility consistently across its platforms. The Wii plays Gamecube games, the Wii U plays Wii games, and the 3DS plays DS games. However, due to the drastic change in form factor, the Nintendo Switch was not backwards compatible with any previous Nintendo consoles. That was due to the Switch being the first handheld home console and it doing away with discs. Since the Switch used a new type of cartridge it couldn’t play any past forms of physical Nintendo games.
Due to the massive success of the Nintendo Switch, it is expected that Nintendo will continue the platform with a successor instead of creating something entirely new. Nintendo tried that with the Wii U after the success of the Wii and was incredibly unsuccessful. If Nintendo wants to bring over the 100 million Switch users it has to the Nintendo Switch 2, backwards compatibility with original Switch games is the way to do that.
