When it comes to the gaming industry, you’re always going to have plenty of people thinking certain things about a company “just because they can.” Then, there are those who will have negative feelings about a company but have a “good explanation” as to why they feel that way. A recent topic that has gotten much discussion, positively and negatively, is the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal from two weeks back. Many have wondered if Nintendo “could’ve done better” and if the Switch 2 “will deliver.” Now, you can add Shuhei Yoshida to that discussion, as he made his feelings known in a recent episode of Easy Allies.
To be blunt, Shuhei Yoshida wasn’t impressed by what he saw, and for a key reason:
“To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo. In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion. For me they are always about creating some new experience, like designing hardware and games together to create something, [an] amazing new experience. But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It’s the larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120fps. They even had a hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right? And because it’s a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is ‘we made things better’, and that’s something other companies have been doing all the time.”
There are many ways to take this, including Yoshida “not seeing the forest through the trees,” but the key thing that we’ll focus on here is the line about how “other companies have been doing that all the time.”
Yes, it’s true that Sony and Xbox have been focused on just “making better versions of past consoles” while Nintendo has focused on “innovations over everything else,” but there’s a key difference that Yoshida has forgotten, one that led to him leaving Sony.
Throughout every phase of console development, regardless of what “innovation” was thought of at Nintendo, The Big N ALWAYS considered its gaming lineup and what to put on the new system. Recently, Xbox and Sony have been more interested in their hardware and showing it off than in having meaningful game releases that capitalize on what they have.
The OG Nintendo Switch has arguably the greatest gaming library ever and the PS5/Xbox Series X/S…doesn’t. And while the Nintendo Switch 2 lineup is barebones right now, many fans expect it to grow, and that alone will overcome any “sameness” that the Switch 2 will likely have.
