Nintendo predicted the future with the Switch, and its gambles paid off massively

Nintendo made three big bets, and all of them were worth it

Nintendo

The Nintendo Switch is one of Nintendo’s most successful consoles, and one of the most successful consoles of all time, sitting just barely behind the Nintendo DS and the PS2. It’s hard to overstate the impact that the Switch has had on the industry at large, and almost eight years into its life, it’s still making waves. 

But it’s not going to be around forever. Nintendo has confirmed that it will be announcing the Switch’s successor within the next six months, and if rumors are to be believed, that could be sooner rather than later. With the Switch era coming to an end, and with the recent announcement of the PS5 Pro, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of game hardware — and how Nintendo hedged a lot of bets that paid off surprisingly well. 

I’m going to be focusing on three aspects in particular, instances where Nintendo went against conventional wisdom with the Switch, to many complaints. But through remarkable foresight, or perhaps just sheer dumb luck, these choices were the right call in the end. 

Portability over power 

Nintendo put portability and playability first, kicking off a whole new generation of devices in the process / Nintendo

Nintendo backed out of the power race decades ago. The GameCube was the last console, either home or handheld, in which Nintendo tried to compete on raw compute power, and it didn’t really translate to sales. The Wii proved that gameplay was more important than graphics for most people, and after the failure of the Wii U, Nintendo made a big change: it combined its handheld and console developments. 

Previously, these two teams had been separate, but combining them meant that more resources could be funneled into supporting just one console: the hybrid Nintendo Switch. Launching what is ostensibly a home console on the power budget of a 2015-era smartphone chip was a huge gamble in 2017. With Microsoft and Sony leaning into the 4K revolution with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro, respectively, launching a device that was barely able to scrape by on 1080p – and often not even that – seemed like a disastrous move. 

Indeed, following the Switch’s announcement, many lamented its lack of power. Some fans had hoped for a more traditional box full of power, and the Switch certainly wasn’t that. But the head honchos at Nintendo knew what they were doing — after 30 years of success in handheld gaming, they knew that there was a big appetite for mobile gaming. Sure, it wouldn’t ever be pushing out a 4K signal, but it offered just enough power to play home console quality games on the go, and hooking it up to a TV was a bit of a bonus beyond that. 

And look at where it’s gotten us in the years since. The Switch was such a home run that Valve took the ball and ran with it, bringing the Steam Deck to market in 2022. The floodgates were open, and it spawned a whole genre of devices that aimed to emulate what the Switch was doing in sacrificing power for portability. Not every device has been a smash hit, but it feels like just about every other company is trying to capture that magic. There are even rumors that the next Xbox console could have a portable component to it. 

The Switch kicked off a portable computing revolution, and the industry will never be the same because of it. 

Media apps don’t matter

Most people watch Netflix on their phones now / Netflix

One of the biggest complaints leveled at the Switch at launch, and in the years since launch, was that it was missing media apps. There are a few available, like Crunchyroll, YouTube, and Hulu, but the big ones? They’re just not there. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV are all absent on the Switch, and for a lot of people, that’s somewhat of a dealbreaker. Or at least it was. 

There’s no doubt that some people use their PS5 and Xbox Series X|S as a media box, but Nintendo made another bet back in 2017 when it launched the Switch. It made sure that the Switch was about gaming, only gaming, and made absolutely zero efforts to court the media streaming giants and make the Switch an attractive platform for media consumption. 

Seven years on, and you don’t really see a lot of complaints about the lack of media apps on the Switch. Maybe people have just accepted that the Switch is never gonna have Netflix, or maybe Nintendo saw the writing on the wall and made a clever choice. 

The way people watch shows and movies has changed in the last decade. It’s impossible to buy a new TV without streaming apps built in now. Most TVs even have dedicated buttons for Netflix or Disney+ on their remotes, and the only reason anybody uses a PS5 or Xbox to access those apps is because it’s already on. 

But even then, most people aren’t watching movies on their TVs. As much as it might seem wrong, the majority of people are more than content watching the next season of Squid Game on their phones or iPads, and that segment of the market isn’t getting smaller anytime soon. 

I suspect that there’s some kind of technical issue preventing the Switch from having big media apps. Maybe there’s some kind of hardware requirement for the type of DRM used in them, and the Switch doesn’t have that. It’s entirely possible that the Switch 2 addresses this, but if that is the case, I don’t think it’ll be on purpose. I think it’ll be a happy accident that lets Netflix and Disney chuck their apps up on the store, even if barely anyone uses it. 

The rise of Discord 

Nintendo's voice chat solution was a temporary solution to a temporary problem / Nintendo

One of the most controversial decisions that Nintendo made with the Switch was omitting system-level voice chat. Pushing voice chat into a dumb little app was a decision that was almost universally hated by just about everyone. Who would ever use it? The answer was nobody, and I think Nintendo knew that. 

Back in 2017, Nintendo knew it had to provide some kind of voice chat. It was expected, and not having it at all would have caused an uproar. So it came up with a stopgap solution — the Switch didn’t have enough resources to have system-level voice chat, so it pushed that feature into an app. Everybody has a smartphone, so those who desperately wanted it could still use it, but the company wouldn’t have to dedicate too many resources to it. If it worked well enough, it was good enough. 

So why do I think it was intentional? Well, in 2017, Discord was on the rise. It wasn’t ubiquitous just yet, but anyone who was immersed in gaming communities knew that it was the next big thing. By the time the Switch hit the market, the Splatoon community operated almost entirely out of Discord. If you wanted to play Splatoon for the Wii U, you would be on Discord. It’s hard to imagine Nintendo didn’t know that, and that’s where the third big gamble came into play. 

Nintendo bet on Discord being the place to voice chat while playing games. It couldn’t launch without a voice chat solution of its own, but it could see the writing on the wall, so it did the bare minimum while hedging its bets on Discord blowing up. Why put resources into creating a powerful, bespoke solution when it’s going to be a wasteland in a few years anyway?

For the most part, Nintendo was right. Nobody ever mentions voice chat on the Switch, and you don’t see a lot of chatter about it for other consoles either. That’s not to say it’s not used at all — plenty of people hop into a voice party on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S and play a few hours of Call of Duty or GTA 5. But both of those games and most games like them usually have some sort of in-game chat feature, too – often necessary for cross-platform chat – and should those games come to Switch, in-game voice chat will more than suffice. 

Discord is also available on both PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at a system level as an alternative to the bespoke chat solution offered by Sony and Microsoft, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same be true of the Switch’s successor. But that’s not necessarily an effort to reignite the desire for system-level voice chat, but instead a way of including the people left behind, who don’t necessarily want to set up a chat on their phone or PC while gaming. Either way, it’s Discord that wins, and Discord where most voice chats are taking place. 

Did Nintendo predict that? Or did it half-ass a solution and get lucky? From my time in the Splatoon community, I’d wager it was the former, but there’s really no way of knowing. 

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All of these things could just be coincidence, a huge streak of luck. But despite some marketing failures here and there, Nintendo does know what it’s doing. It does have some amount of insight into the gaming world and how it’s evolving, and it’s surprisingly in-touch with youthful demographics. 

The Switch 2, or whatever it’s going to be called, could be a massive failure. Following up a huge success with another hasn’t exactly been Nintendo’s forte over the years. But, if the Switch is anything to go by, we can probably look at the stuff that makes people angry when it launches and get a pretty good idea of what the future of gaming and media consumption as a whole is going to look like. 

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