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Following its Corporate Management Policy Briefing, Nintendo confirmed on Twitter that Nintendo Switch games will remain playable on “the successor to the Nintendo Switch”, which most are currently calling Switch 2.

The full Management Policy Briefing, available on Nintendo’s website, also describes Nintendo’s current situation in the console hardware market, highlighting the 146 million units sold of the Nintendo Switch family and the fact that ” more software has been played on Nintendo Switch than any other. Nintendo hardware.” Complete 59-page PDF goes quite in-depth on sales data and other historical information, confirming that the current Nintendo Switch Online service (as well as Music, etc) will continue with the release of Nintendo Switch 2.

Now, if you’re on the Sony or Microsoft side of console compatibility, this news probably won’t surprise you much. Microsoft Xbox has maintained superb backwards compatibility, including FPS Boost and Resolution Boosting features, for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games played on Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X. Sony PlayStation’s backwards compatibility practices have been more limited since the PS3 (which supported all previous consoles). Always, PlayStation 5 supports PS4 titles almost perfectly, and many PS2 and PS1 games are even playable via emulation. However, the PS3 is relegated to cloud streaming on PS4 and PS5, much to the dismay of PlayStation gamers.

Nintendo’s backwards compatibility has always been pretty good… until the Nintendo Switch. The previous console, the Nintendo Wii U, could play games from discs from the Wii and GameCube and had access to a Virtual Console that filled in almost all of the remaining gaps in Nintendo’s previous libraries. The previous handheld, the Nintendo 3DS, could also play Nintendo DS titles, although no 3DS model could play the Game Boy Advance and other pre-dual-screen Nintendo handheld games.

It wasn’t until the Nintendo Switch, which converged Nintendo’s handheld and home console families and also moved from PowerPC to Arm CPU cores, that Nintendo eliminated backwards compatibility altogether. latest generation. Fortunately, it appears that the Switch and its accessible Nvidia-powered mobile hardware have been successful enough for Nintendo to stick with this new system, meaning people buying games for the Switch today won’t have to worry. no need to worry about what to play on Switch 2 when it happens.

Hopefully this also means that titles otherwise hamstrung by Nintendo’s original hardware, like Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Realmwill now be playable above 60 FPS without the emulation software that Nintendo is so dedicated to killing– probably in part because, like Dolphin could emulate GameCube and Wii, unfettered Switch emulators could probably emulate Switch 2 as well.