Today, Nintendo announced the Switch 2, offering us a wordless video overview of the hardware's exterior. The system will be released sometime in 2025, with more details coming via a Nintendo Direct on April 2. Media outlets such as Nintendo Life, IGN, and Kotaku have more details that I won't repeat here, and GameStop has an email list to alert you when the console is available for preorder.

The reactions among my friends and in my feeds has been mixed — but all of them, positive and negative, have focused on a perceived lack of hardware innovation in the Switch 2. From Nintendo Life:

… it's hard not to see Switch 2 as a stop-gap console at this stage. This is a straight sequel to a barnstormer that gives Nintendo another generation to figure out what to do next — and I don't think Nintendo has another eight-year cycle to figure it out.

Similarly, from Keza MacDonald at The Guardian, published a day before the official reveal:

This is a very un-Nintendo way to do things. Apart from the NES/SNES, every single Nintendo console has been a form-factor revolution. There was the N64, with its pioneering analogue stick and three-pronged controller; the squat, toylike GameCube; the Wii, with its motion control remotes; its follow-up, the Wii U, added a screen in the middle of its controller. This is the first time that Nintendo has ever made two successive consoles that look the same and work the same… They even share a name, and a logo: the current most credible information indicates that it will be called the Nintendo Switch 2.

MacDonald is right about the hardware — but what's more meaningful to the end user is that every two generations of Nintendo consoles have had similar kinds of games. The Super Nintendo evolved the 2D gameplay of the NES; the GameCube perfected the 3D worlds of the Nintendo 64; and the Switch 2 will offer more and better versions of what we saw on the Switch. This is par for the course for Nintendo: they're innovative every other generation, alternating with being iterative.

But there are exceptions to every rule, and you'll notice two systems missing from my timeline: the Wii and the Wii U. The Wii's motion controls were wildly popular, yet Nintendo largely abandoned them for Wii U. In fact, the Wii U could be seen as more similar to the Switch: the most common question I got on my Wii U unboxing video was, "Can I use the GamePad without the console?" Thanks to Nintendo's poor marketing and console naming, players didn't know if the Wii U GamePad was the console itself. Gamers didn't understand why a controller with an embedded screen would be tethered to a television. It was the Switch that finally fulfilled those expectations.

So yes, hardware-wise, the Switch 2 is unlikely to innovate on the scale Nintendo is known for. Can you blame them? The original Switch is the third best-selling game console of all time, both in the USA and in the world, behind only the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo DS. Why would Nintendo not want to repeat that success?

Frankly, I'm relieved. The Nintendo Switch is nearly the perfect console for me, and I still have 120+ games for it in my backlog. A new console that does everything the Switch does, except better, suits me just fine. The moniker "Switch 2" captures that goal clearly, without any of the confusion of previous consoles' names, while still suggesting a bigger leap forward than just a "Switch Pro". (Be glad it's not the Super Switch U 64!)

As for the still-unknown release date: after the original Switch released on March 3, 2017, Nintendo has once again missed an obvious opportunity to release a console on March 10, or MAR10 Day. But based on other historical precedents — IGN has a chronological list of every Nintendo hardware release date — I'm guessing we'll see the Switch 2 hitting store shelves in either June (targeting kids going on summer break) or November (in time for the holidays).

It's been eight years since the first Switch's release, and five years since a major console was released (the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2020, the first year of the pandemic). With no other major console releases in 2025, Nintendo has no direct competition for headlines in this console generation; it's their game to win.