It’s difficult not to feel a little disappointed by Nintendo’s announcement Thursday about the Switch 2. The fact that the company seems to be playing it protected by releasing its most conservative recent console in years isn’t a huge surprise. What was surprising was how tender the reveal itself was. But maybe that’s because, to anyone obsessed with technology, the video Nintendo released looked eerily familiar. The low three-minute trailer didn’t look like what other gaming consoles reveal; instead, it looked almost exactly like the sizzle reels that Apple releases every year for the recent iPhone.
Nintendo adopting Apple’s strategy makes natural sense. While most tech industry giants have focused on software and subscriptions as their core business model, with an emphasis on hardware that borders on complacency, Apple is the latest massive company with an unwavering focus on hardware. What he wants to sell you isn’t services, it’s laptops, tablets and, most importantly, phones.
A quick glance at the gaming industry will tell you that Nintendo is in a fairly similar situation. While Sony releases as many of its own games as possible on PC and Microsoft tells everyone that everything they own can be an Xbox with Game Pass, Nintendo continues to focus on exclusive games and console sales. So it looks like the Apple of console makers is getting an Apple-style ad.
The Switch 2 trailer ticks all the right boxes: it’s beautifully photographed, with silky transitions that show off all the little changes between the original Switch and the recent machine, down to the elegant enlargement of the device itself and the toned down bezel around the screen. At first glance, the recent magnetic Joy-Con consoles seem to have something of Apple’s MagSafe DNA. But while all of this works perfectly for a phone that gets a recent version every year, it ignores the fact that the Switch 2 can’t simply be an update to the iPhone. The video suggests that this is something strictly iterative, much like a phone model. Nintendo’s video literally takes an venerable device and transforms it into a recent one. So it’s no wonder that some viewers felt like they didn’t quite see Nintendo’s next-generation announcement.
For all the ways Apple invests in people buying recent iPhones, Apple has the luxury of taking these purchases for granted. He knows that not every person will upgrade their phone every year, but eventually almost every iPhone user in the world will buy a newer phone; it is the model on which the entire business is based.
In a world where updates are inevitable, iteration is enough. But I still want Nintendo to sell me something. It’s been eight years since the Switch launched, and while some of its open-world offerings have started to appeal, the absolute need for an upgrade isn’t entirely clear.
Elegant, concealed, pretty, enticing and a little empty, the film is perfect for the hours-plus of tech discussions led by Apple executives that usually follow an iPhone reveal. But Nintendo’s version won’t appear until Nintendo Direct on April 2, during which we’ll hope the company reveals why it actually thinks we’ll want to buy this recent console – beyond revealing the anodyne-looking Mario Kart, it might just be another iteration Mario Kart 8 for everything we know.
Like Apple, Nintendo is historically not a stupid company. In fact, it is usually a very successful and intelligent company. Those higher up at Nintendo probably know that the company needs innovation and ingenuity more than iteration and more than just another Mario Kart to successfully follow as the third best-selling console of all time. Evidence of this innovation is hidden in the Switch 2 trailer. There is compelling evidence that the Joy-Cons can transform into a mouse, and there is slight potential for 24-player multiplayer and voice chat, which would suggest a significantly improved user experience Internet. Moreover, Nintendo’s publishing division, as well as other game developers, still have plenty of time to reveal the games that players will be able to download on the day of the recent console’s launch.
The problem is that Nintendo’s trailer left us to work through it all on our own, rather than giving us something concrete to get excited about. And while Nintendo was right to think that fans and websites like Polygon would scrub the trailer immaculate of every possible detail, it’s difficult not to feel like the company took our expectations at least a little for granted. It’s possible, even likely, that all this frustration will magically dissipate once we see it Metroid Prime 4: Beyondor some recent magical Mario game or even Pokémon Legends: A.S runs at a reproducible frame rate during Nintendo Direct on April 2. But until then, Nintendo has left us to come up with our own reasons why the Switch 2 is more than a marginal improvement.
Maybe my venerable phone is fine for now.
