Developer Says Switch Successor to Face Challenges With Backwards Compatibility - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 06 March 2023 / 5,824 Views
NightDive Studios developer ModernVintageGamer in a new video posted to YouTube suggests Nintendo will face challenges with backwards compatibility with the successor to the Nintendo Switch.
"If Nintendo is to move away from the Tegra X1, which we all feel strongly that they will probably do, current Switch games won’t work on new hardware, that is without recompiling the games to target that hardware," said the developer via VideoGamesChronicle.
The Switch uses the Tegra X1 chip from Nvidia that also powered the Nvidia Shield from 2015 to 2018.
Some suggestions the developer gave to make backwards compatibility work was to use emulation similar to how the Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One is able to play Xbox 360 and original Xbox games. This is like how third-party emulators work on PC. The one downside to this is the amount of processing power required. The Steam Deck has struggled to emulate Switch games well.
Another suggestion is to include the Tegra X1 chip inside every Switch successor, which means older games wouldn't need to use emulation in order to work. However, that could raise the price of the platform. Next-generation patches for Switch games could also be offered.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Every game in the Switch catalog remastered at $70, here we go
I've been pretty loyal to Nintendo, but if the next Switch isn't backwards compatible, I'm spending my money elsewhere.
It makes no since putting money into a company whose only interest seems to be making my digital purchases 100% worthless.
Well, you could continue to play them on your switch.
I hear what you're saying though.
Part of the reason everyone wants a more powerful Switch is to upgrade and play the games that are struggling on it with better resolutions and frame rates.
If it's more expensive and I have to rebuy all my games, the Switch 2 becomes a very tough sell.
If you say so. I want a new Switch for next gen games.
If all you care about is next gen, then you don't even need a Switch.
There are portables on the market that are 10x more powerful out there and of course, the Steam deck.
Why pay $40 to play The Witcher 3 at 540p (sub HD) when I can have a portable system that can play it at 1080p/60 right now and I won't have to rebuy my games everytime a new system launches...
If Nintendo thinks everyone will happily throw away their money starting over with all the competition out there, they will be sadly mistaken.
I buy Nintendo systems for Nintendo games only. I almost never play anything other than exclusives on Nintendo hardware.
Tropical freeze was $50 for the Wii U.
$60 for the Switch.
$70 for the Switch 2.
Brilliant.
lol
The comment about emulation is a bit silly. PSP could emulate PS1 titles but you need a PC more powerful than a PSP to do the same. I have no doubt Nintendo can easily get software emulation of Switch titles working on the Switch successor even if it isn't quite as powerful as the steam deck. If it doesn't then it's not because of technical limitations but lack of effort.
difference is a dedicated team with the proper dev kits equipment and are familiar with the hardware architecture non stop for months compared to handful of homebrewers trying to do it in some spare time
I don't know how chipsets and backwards compatibility works and all that, but I thought it had long been assumed Nintendo would be using just like next-gen version of the same sort of Nvidia chips so backwards compatibility wouldn't be a problem? Maybe that's not how this all works though haha. But I thought if its the same Nvidia architecture, just an obviously much more powerful chip, the games would run the same.
Unless what they are saying is newer Nvidia chips use a different architecture.
Anyway, whatever happens, they better have full backwards compatibility because it'd be insane for them to follow up one of the top 3 most popular systems ever with a system that doesn't play those games. I'm fine working my way through the Switch library for numerous more years so I can keep playing Switch for a long time and not upgrade to next-gen if there's no backward compatibility.
More excuses to resell older games at a premium cost.
Worst case just have it like the DS where it had a separate slot for the GBA games and DS games
I'm not too worried. Nintendo has historically been pretty big on backwards compatability even when it wasn't simple to do so. The Switch was an exception but changing from dual screens to a single one made that almost unavoidable. Not counting that we have to go all the way back to the GameCube to find a system that wasn't backwards compatible.
Yeah I don’t get why people are complaining over this so much. Wii U was backwards compat. Wii was. 3DS was. DS was. Switch makes sense that it wasn’t.
That's a good point, at least with physical games. Their track record with digital purchase has been a little iffy so far.
Agree with digital.. but every company is always adapting. Some are quicker than others. But the blatant greed shit people have been bringing up is a lil irritating considering Nintendo has had the most generous track record for backwards compatibility. Now yes I am talking physical but the other companies didn’t really start this stuff until recently
As I mentioned above, Sony tried to do BC until they found out that it was economically unfeasible for them to do so, and that ended up being a feature that got dropped in later revisions of the PS3 and abandoned completely on PS4.
Deluxe editions of Switch games incoming for Switch 2 at $70.
Well, that's worrisome. I'd hoped that Nintendo and Nvidia would be able to use some kind of unified architecture that would be more powerful while still supporting older games, creating a persistent Nintendo ecosystem. Shigeru Miyamoto even acknowledged this point back in November and suggested it was much easier to do than it had been in earlier generations.
Sony infamously ran into the same issue with the PS3. It originally included a PS2 EE and Graphics Synthesizer to provide full backwards compatibility, but they had to dial it back in subsequent revisions in order to get the PS3's initial high price down to a mass market penetration level that could compete with Wii and 360 without bleeding Sony dry at a time that the company was struggling to stay afloat under Howard Stringer. They went to dropping the EE but keeping the GS and doing partial BC through emulation, and then ended up dropping the GS by the time the Slim came out and just abandoning PS2 games altogether. The PS4 was a complete reboot of the PS ecosystem, though thankfully a lot of the best PS3 games are available on contemporary hardware.
Oh boy, they better figure it out. I will wait for a while if it can't play Switch games cause my backlog is too big and i ain't buying these games again.
For reference, he has no insider knowledge of the Switch successor and is speculating based on the T239 leaks. And this isn't news, he's been posting these ruminations for over a year.
This sounds like exactly the way Nintendo would like to do it, so they can sell you your old games at full price again. Nobody is worse (or better, depending on your perspective) about that than Nintendo.
