WB Games has offered a great deal for their Hogwarts Legacy fanbase.
As found by Wario64, WB Games offers an upgrade for Hogwarts Legacy from the Switch to the Switch 2. Incredibly enough, the upgrade is only $ 10. To be clear, it doesn’t show up on the eShop by default. Wario64 found that people who already have a digital copy of the game were shown the upgrade path when they log onto the eShop.
On the side, if you don’t own the game yet on the Switch, Hogwarts Legacy is currently 70 % off in the US. The game may also be on sale on the Switch eShop on other regions, so this is a clear path to get the game for cheap on the Switch 2. Yes, this is one of the first Switch 2 games you can get with a huge discount.
But this is even more incredible news if you knew what WB Games was doing with Hogwarts Legacy. As they explained three weeks ago, the Switch 2 version is being built from the ground up. This means this isn’t an upgrade pack in the same way that Nintendo’s games have upgrade packs.
In the game development side, it makes more sense for WB Games to execute this port in this way. While we have shared a lot of praise to the bespoke port game studios like Virtuos, in most cases there were real compromises to make ‘impossible ports’ for the Switch. The Switch 2 runs Switch games through a translation layer, and so they don’t take full advantage of the Switch 2’s potential.
And so, making a new port from the ground up will more fully realize the potential of each Switch 2 game. On top of that, based on what developers have been saying about the Switch 2 hardware, it would also be easier for them to make these native ports from the ground up instead of trying to work with the existing Switch version.
We also have to credit WB Games for offering this upgrade since it’s something they don’t have to do. Of course, they did it for the same reason Sony offered digital upgrades for the PlayStation 4 games they had remastered to the PlayStation 5. They do want to keep their existing customers happy, and theoretically could get more customers this way as people who would want to pay for a cheaper upgrade will now spend for it.
While we don’t expect most game companies to offer cheap upgrades like this, we do hope that developers choose to make new native ports of their games on the Switch 2, even if they already exist on the Switch. We will just get higher performance games on the platform this way.
