As you’d expect, there have been a lot of things said about the Nintendo Switch 2 since it was properly introduced with release date and controversial pricing earlier this month. Now, ex-PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida has had his say on the new console, and he reckons it might be a sign of Ninty losing its historic identity.
Hey, regardless of whether you agree or reckon this is a good or bad thing, at least it’s not more news that makes you clutch your wallet a bit tighter or allow yourself a rare smirk at something cheeky that’s been done by a CEO guy who makes more money in a year than most of us probably will in 10.
Anyway, Yoshida’s comments about the Switch 2 and what it could mean for the Mario company’s soul came during an interview with Easy Allies, during which Yoshida was asked for his thoughts on the big April Direct.
“To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo,” he replied, “In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing [its] identity, in my opinion. For me they are always about creating some new experience, designing hardware and games together to create [some] amazing new experience.
“But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It’s a larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120 FPS. They even had a hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right? And because it’s a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is ‘we made things better’, and that’s something other companies have been doing all the time.
Of course it’s a more powerful Switch,” he added, “so it’s great if your gaming was only on Nintendo hardware, [and] it’s the first time for you to be able to play amazing games like Elden Ring, but for us, the ‘core’ gamers who own multiple [types of] hardware and play games on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, the games they showed off, especially from third parties – in theory, it’s amazing to have all these all-stars of industry games on Nintendo hardware – however, what they showed was like…‘ooh’.” For context, that seemed to be an ‘ooh’ with more of an ‘oh, ok’ sentiment, rather than the sound of someone being blown away.
So, it sounds like Yoshida wasn’t that impressed by the stuff you could class as innovative about the Switch 2, such as that mouse joy-con functionality and the C button that lets you yell at your mates via GameChat.
Would you like to have seen Ninty push the boat out a bit more with the Switch 2, or are you cool with it just delivering a refined version of an already good thing? Let us know below!
