Nintendo officially confirms Switch 2 is backward compatible with Switch games

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Unlike Wii U to Switch, players will be able to bring their games over to the new system

Switch OLED
(Image credit: Nintendo)

After its Corporate Management Policy Briefing, Nintendo confirmed on Twitter that Nintendo Switch games would remain playable on "the successor to Nintendo Switch," which most are currently calling Switch 2.

The entire Management Policy Briefing, available on Nintendo's website, also describes the current status of Nintendo in the console hardware market, highlighting the 146 million units sold of the Nintendo Switch Family and that "more software has been played on Nintendo Switch than on any other Nintendo hardware." The full 59-page PDF goes pretty 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 Nintendo Switch 2's release.

Now, if you're from the Sony or Microsoft side of console compatibility, this news likely does not surprise you very much. Microsoft Xbox has maintained superb backward compatibility, including FPS Boost and Resolution Boosting functionality, for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games played on Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X. Sony PlayStation's backward compatibility practices have been more limited since PS3 (which supported all past consoles). Still, PlayStation 5 does support PS4 titles near-perfectly, and a fair few PS2 and PS1 games are even playable through emulation. However, PS3 is relegated to cloud streaming on PS4 and PS5, much to the chagrin of PlayStation gamers.

Nintendo's backward compatibility has historically been pretty good...until the Nintendo Switch. The prior console, Nintendo Wii U, could play games off discs from Wii and GameCube and had access to a Virtual Console that covered nearly all the remaining gaps in Nintendo's past libraries. The prior handheld, Nintendo 3DS, could also play Nintendo DS titles— though no model of 3DS could play Game Boy Advance and other pre-dual screen Nintendo handheld games.

It wasn't until Nintendo Switch, which converged Nintendo's handheld and home console families and also changed from PowerPC to Arm CPU cores, that Nintendo entirely eliminated last-gen backward compatibility. Fortunately, it seems the Switch and its accessible Nvidia-powered mobile hardware have been successful enough for Nintendo to stick with this new scheme, and that means people buying games for Switch today won't have to worry about what to play on Switch 2 when it arrives.

Hopefully, this also means that titles otherwise crippled by Nintendo's original hardware, like Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, will now be playable above 60 FPS without the emulation software that Nintendo is so dedicated to killing— likely in part because like Dolphin could emulate GameCube and Wii, unhindered Switch emulators could likely emulate Switch 2, as well.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    Unlike Wii U to Switch

    i mean i think only XB has more than 1 generation of backwards support.

    sony/nintendo have always only been 1 gen of backwards upport. (gamecube to wii, wii to wii u, ps2 to ps3 early on models)
    Reply
  • Heat_Fan89
    Wait a minute! No one at Nintendo has said their next effort is going to be called the Switch 2 or even look the same or similar as the current Switch.

    Are we jumping the gun a wee bit here?
    Reply
  • ThisIsMe
    This is likely the main reason behind Nintendo’s recent campaign to destroy all that is related to switch emulation. It stands to reason that if the new hardware is compatible with the old, then an emulation engine could simply be modified/upgraded to support the new system without much effort. Relatively speaking of course.
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    ThisIsMe said:
    This is likely the main reason behind Nintendo’s recent campaign to destroy all that is related to switch emulation. It stands to reason that if the new hardware is compatible with the old, then an emulation engine could simply be modified/upgraded to support the new system without much effort. Relatively speaking of course.
    nothing is really destroyed. everything is online using torrents. no one can defeat Piracy ... until all the games become streamed cloud games ofc , that is you cant have the game files at all ., but this needs the whole world to have very fast internet ... maybe in 10 years from now.
    Reply
  • Notton
    it'd be weird if it wasn't backwards compatible. It's the same architecture, just highly beefed up GPU and on a more modern node.
    Reply