You don’t have to take great pains to preserve your Switch to ensure that you can still play your favorite games on it years and years from now. Nintendo has revealed in its earnings report that the upcoming successor to the Switch will have backwards compatibility and will be able to run games made for the current console. In addition, Switch Online will also be available on the Switch 2, which means your saves stored on the cloud will be carried over and you’ll be able to play NES, SNES and Game Boy titles on the new console.
Nintendo explained that it’s making Switch Online available on the upcoming console, because it thinks it’s important for the company’s future to “carry over the good relationship” it has built with its more than 100 million annual playing users to the new device. The main way to do so is to make use of the Nintendo Account, which ties a user’s history to one account and enables the company to “maintain a continuous relationship” with them across console generations. Before the Nintendo Account was introduced, Nintendo had no easy way to carry a user’s history and purchases over to the next console. “As a result, our relationship with the consumers was interrupted when a new system was purchased,” it said.
The company promised to reveal more information about the Switch 2 “at a later date,” though it didn’t say when exactly. In a recent event where we thought the new Switch could be announced, Nintendo launched an alarm clock instead. Based on its earnings results, it looks like people could be choosing to wait for the new console instead of buying the current Switch: The company had to downgrade its sales forecast for the fiscal year due to a big decline in console sales compared to the same periods last year.
