Nintendo took an unusual approach to the past two decades of video game console wars. It stayed out of them. But with today’s Nintendo Switch 2 info dump — packed with big-name third-party games rarely seen on Nintendo hardware — the House that Mario Built appears ready to rejoin the fray. Why now? Credit a collision of confidence, opportunity, and necessity.
Sony and Microsoft have spent generations bloodying each other in a battle for the most extravagant visuals, courting favor with major publishers like Activision and Electronic Arts. Meanwhile, Nintendo swam in the opposite direction, favoring cheaper, less powerful machines that prioritized toy-like novelty over raw specs.
The historic successes of both the Wii and the Switch obscure how risky this gamble has been. The slower hardware — with a few, better-forgotten exceptions — couldn’t run the latest entries in gaming’s most popular franchises, including Madden, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto. Survival hinged on Nintendo’s ability to produce multiple exclusive hits each year, with smaller indie titles filling the gaps.
With the Switch, everything went Nintendo’s way — by both design and good fortune. The publisher assembled arguably the greatest first-party lineup in history. Indie development exploded. And a new wave of beloved IP — Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox — designed for smartphone-level specs meant that Nintendo’s hardware, unintentionally, could play some of the biggest games on the planet.
Image: Square Enix
And yet, today, Nintendo’s hourlong Switch 2 reveal stream featured an abundance of titles once rare on its systems. 2K Games showed off new entries in the WWE, Civilization, and Borderlands franchises. Other developers, like IO Interactive, pledged to bring hits once best experienced on Xbox or PlayStation, like Hitman and the upcoming Project 007. Square Enix showed the remakes of Final Fantasy 7, and EA appeared, committing EA Sports FC and Madden to the platform.
It’s possible that coming off the success of the Switch — a far cry from Nintendo’s grim posture after the Wii U — the gamemaker feels positioned to push into the third-party territory ceded to Sony and Microsoft, the latter of which seems to be clinging to its hardware business by its fingertips. After all, Nintendo has sold over 150 million Switch consoles — more than the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S combined.
It’s also possible a mix of luck and industry trends will once again favor Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft’s reluctance to fully leave the PS4 and Xbox One era behind — coupled with a generation raised on mobile gaming — has trained AAA developers to build for underpowered hardware. The Switch 2 will still trail behind top-tier machines in horsepower, but that may no longer matter. Most major franchises simply don’t demand cutting-edge specs.
Both of those are likely a piece of the puzzle. But I believe Nintendo’s decision to release a more expensive and slightly more powerful device may have less to do with past console wars and more to do with its biggest threat in the present. In 2025, Valve’s Steam Deck does what the Switch doesn’t: It lets players enjoy most AAA games any time, anywhere — and offers many of the same indie titles at steep discounts. (That it also runs emulated games from every Nintendo console ever released surely isn’t lost on the company either, as it continues its crackdown on third-party emulation.)
Image: Nintendo
If Nintendo once again ignores third parties and their graphical needs, it would find itself competing against a growing number of handhelds that offer more power and more games, often with better specs — albeit higher prices.
Inexplicably, Microsoft and Sony burned an entire hardware cycle without answering the Switch’s key selling point: portability. It took a PC gaming marketplace — with almost no hardware pedigree — to offer legitimate competition. And Nintendo, with the Switch 2’s higher price, greater power, and suite of PC-like social features, seems to be taking the threat seriously.
Yes, Nintendo has reentered the modern console wars. Maybe, one day, Sony and Microsoft will too.
All the ways you should prep to pre-order a Nintendo Switch 2
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