The official unveiling of the Switch 2 was an incredibly confident moment for Nintendo. It was brief and lacking almost entirely in details. There was no price, no release date, and no confirmed games outside of a Mario Kart tease. The 2 in the name implied a bigger and better Switch, but when it came to the how — the chips that will power the device, the screen that will make Zelda and Mario look great — Nintendo deemed it wasn’t important enough to share right away.
And it’s right: unlike the rest of the industry, Nintendo has carved out a path where specs no longer matter.
It wasn’t always this way. Previous Nintendo consoles were sold, as their contemporaries were, on horsepower. The Super Nintendo was a more-powerful NES, while the N64’s processor was deemed so important that the system was named after it. But things started to change around the time of the GameCube. Nintendo had experienced a steady decline in console sales over subsequent generations; while the NES and Famicom sold more than 60 million units, that was down to just over 20 million for the GameCube. At the same time, Nintendo’s direct competition had changed significantly. After getting a taste of going up against Sony during the N64 era, Nintendo was now up against a second tech behemoth in Microsoft. Competing on technological prowess no longer made much sense.
Something had to change — and that change came in the form of the Wii.
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Once infamously described as “two GameCubes and some duct tape,” the Wii wasn’t a major advancement over its predecessor in terms of how games looked or ran. While the Xbox 360 touted blockbusters like Halo 3, and the PS3 was showing off next-gen visuals through Resistance and MotorStorm, the Wii was defined by Wii Sports, in which characters looked like eggs and didn’t even have arms. And yet, the game, which was bundled with the console everywhere but Japan, went on to become one of the best-selling games of all time because of how it played, rather than how it looked.
This shift came because of what Nintendo called its “blue ocean” strategy. The idea was that the increasing technological complexity of games was actually making them less appealing to many consumers. We’d come a long way from the simplicity of making Mario run and jump in the original Super Mario Bros. Just looking at a GameCube controller could be overwhelming for many. As former Nintendo of America president Reggile Fils-Aime wrote in 2007, “While ardent players reliably responded to ever-advancing technology and complexity, those same attributes consistently chipped off potential new players from the total market, narrowing the consumers into a smaller niche.”
This meant the best path forward for Nintendo was to get out of the technological arms race and find a way to broaden the market. For the Wii, that was a console with specs that were mostly good enough to run modern 3D games, but where the focus was on its motion-sensitive controller that made games more intuitive to play, like with Wii Sports. This was followed by the Nintendo DS, a handheld that introduced touchscreen controls before smartphones were ubiquitous. Both were massive hits: the Wii sold more than 100 million units, while the DS topped 150 million. And both proved that specs are a minor concern — if they’re a concern at all — to most consumers, as they surpassed more powerful competitors in terms of sales. (Sorry, Vita.)
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Finding the right direction for a console isn’t always easy, as evidenced by the Wii U, which was a failed early attempt to merge the worlds of home consoles and portable gaming. But by shifting away from specs and graphics to focus on player experience, Nintendo has not only carved out a space for itself, but it is arguably as successful as it has ever been at a time when the video game industry is struggling on many fronts.
The Switch is a pure expression of this philosophy. It’s an underpowered tablet that doubles as a home console, and despite going up against beefy PlayStations, Xboxes, and a burgeoning field of portable PCs, it’s on track to become Nintendo’s best-selling piece of hardware ever (and it might even surpass the record set by the PS2). Its modest technical chops are overshadowed by a straightforward premise — you can take games with you anywhere — while also allowing Nintendo to develop lots of games in a more sustainable way than its competitors, who are struggling with the massive increasing costs of live service and blockbuster games.
That’s why Nintendo didn’t utter a single spec when revealing the Switch 2 — because they’re not the point. Whatever powers the company’s next device has will be mostly good enough for the next open-world Zelda, but the specs don’t need to be detailed in a lengthy video that uses words like upscaling and teraflops. Those details are coming, of course, but they’re secondary to the core idea: this will be just like your old Switch, only better. You don’t need specs to get that across.
