I hope all of you are ready for a lot of PS4, PS5, and Xbox ports arriving on Switch 2 over the next few months, because that seems to be our future. For folks who primarily play on Switch and soon Switch 2, it will be a chance to play a lot of great games that were too much for the OG console to handle, or which arrived via less-than-stellar ports. For everyone else, well, that new Donkey Kong game looks cool...
The $450 Nintendo Switch 2 is nearly here, though some people already have their hands on the console ahead of its June 5 launch. Its launch lineup isn’t horrible, but it’s nothing too impressive either. It mainly features a handful of new, exclusive games, like Mario Kart World, and some upgraded versions of OG Switch games. But the majority of the Switch 2's launch lineup is ports like Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s because, unlike the old Switch, Nintendo’s new machine is actually going to be able to run these games without compromising visuals and features.
Looking at the launch lineup for June 5, of the 25 or so games arriving on day one, about 10 of them are ports of old games that didn’t arrive on the original Switch. Stuff like the previously mentioned Cyberpunk 2077, Street Fighter 6, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and Split Fiction. Then there are some Switch 2 ports that are replacing or upgrading older Switch ports, including Civilization 7, Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, and Hitman: World of Assassination, which was only available as a cloud-powered streaming game on the old machine. There are also ports that are coming after launch, like Star Wars Outlaws in September.
It’s not surprising that a big chunk of games announced for Switch 2 so far are ports of older titles. The original Switch got plenty of ports during its run, but most AAA games were chopped up and squished onto the aging hardware, resulting in some really ugly conversions.
Sure, some of these games, like Doom (2016), ran mostly fine and looked okay on Nintendo’s hybrid console, but there was always this feeling when playing these ports that the Switch hardware was being pushed to its limits. And then, when the PS5 and Xbox Series X arrived on the scene in 2020, games started targeting the more powerful hardware, and Switch ports became harder to pull off. As a result, we got some truly gnarly versions of great-looking games. Remember Mortal Kombat 1 on Switch? Yikes.
In the last few years, fewer and fewer big games have been making the leap to Switch, primarily because the hardware is so old and outdated that they would be impossible to pull it off, or you’d have to compromise the visuals and performance so much that it wouldn’t be worth it.
So the Switch 2 is a big deal for a lot of publishers who have been unable to bring some of their recent games to Nintendo’s audience, which is often cited as a group of people hungry for new content. And for players, it means they’ll receive some fantastic-looking ports.
As recently pointed out by Digital Foundry, Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2 looks as good (and sometimes better) than the open-world game running on an Xbox Series S or PS4. That’s thanks in large part to DLSS, but also the guts of the Switch 2 are just significantly better than those of the Switch. There is more power inside this new console, and that’s going to be good news for devs, publishers, and players.
All of this does mean that the Switch 2 will likely end up being something of a port machine as publishers race to get their big games running on the new console. That might be annoying for people who buy Nintendo consoles for exclusives and unique experiences, but with Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 4, and Donkey Kong Bananza on the way, we can feel pretty confident that we’ll get plenty of those games, too. They’ll just be the outliers among a ton of nice-looking PS5 and Xbox ports.
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