I refuse to queue shit posts because that is too much work but I will continue to post oddly prescient Nintendo predictions.
On today's episode, I will predict the Switch's successor.
As with my previous prediction regarding Paper Mario, it is valuable to examine the past to predict the future.
What most people don't tell you about Nintendo consoles is that most of them are boring and only the last few have been interesting. The Color TV Game, NES, SNES, 64, and GameCube are fundamentally boring devices when compared to their contemporaries. They are notable mainly for the quality of software and evolution of their controller from an Arcade plat to a versatile hand-shaped interface with four face buttons, two sticks, some number of triggers, and a d-pad. (And three pause buttons, as God intended.) It is worth mentioning that Nintendo home consoles follow a strict pattern of a popular console followed by an unpopular one. NES followed by SNES, 64 followed by GC, Wii followed by Wii U. It is highly likely the Switch's successor will fail to exceed its parent, considering the Switch is making DS numbers.
The real history, as true connoisseurs will tell you, is in the handheld division and in peripherals. The Zapper, the Keyboard, the Mouse, the GB Camera&Printer, ROB. Nintendo supplemented their consoles with secondary hardware to facilitate unconventional play approaches. When the GameCube struck, though, Nintendo began using interplay as a feature. GC games with GBA compatible features, the Link cable, that sort of thing. Nintendo WFC in the Wii/DS era made this process wireless, but it fell out of favor simultaneously.
An evolutionary lineage can be drawn through each Nintendo console since the GameCube. The GC had a handle to make it easier to carry, which was a stray bit of DNA from the hybrid-intended Virtual Boy. The two-screen TV-handheld play style of games like Four Swords encouraged the development of a two-screen device that was lightweight enough to stand on its own. Hence, the DS. The DS had a touch screen, which is apparently a nonrestrictive piece of technology considering every handheld since has had one. More importantly, though, a quirk of a handheld console is that you hold the screen in your hands. In Mario Kart, play testers would lean into the turns with their hands. Brain Age had you hold the device like a Book. Bowser's Inside Story made the screens into a diorama for giant battles. The hardware could become a part of the play experience rather than a passive window into it.
That the Wii came next is a no brainer. Its unconventional controller design still retains untapped potential to this very day. For as shallow and weak some of the casual output in the Wii era was, the innovation on display from most developers during this period was outstanding. Mario Kart Wii is played *by* leaning into the turns. The Wii remote and Nunchuk added several new features to the Nintendo hardware ecosystem: motion, IR pointer, a controller split between both hands, an asymmetric controller interface, and the concept of the "room" becoming part of the play space.
Early games for 3DS attempted to continue these concepts. The 3DS is packed full of garbage: multiple cameras, a gyroscope, 3D (hi again Virtual Boy, so weird to see more of you again), a mic, touch screen, an increased focus on Wi-Fi & Street pass. The longer the 3DS lived, the more obvious it became that users wanted more of the DS, and not a Square Whatsit for looking around their room holding in front of their face, though.
This is a lesson the Wii U failed completely to learn, thoroughly regressing to the GameCube era of putting the TV and handheld device at odds with each other. The good part of the DS was a touch screen that didn't get in the way of the display, not Having to look in two places at once. What's more, the Square Whatsit is even heavier and more cumbersome. The only key feature of the Wii U not present in a more appealing form is the ability to zoop the TV screen down onto the game pad and walk around your house with it. Not any further though.
So anyway, they made it so that you could go further with the Switch. This fucking thing is firing on all cylinders: symmetrical motion controllers that are also their own tiny full controllers for two players, an IR pointer, a touch screen, a gyroscope, fully hybrid! The fat has been trimmed: no cameras, no mic, no dedicated 3D display. And best of all: a dock for turning your beefcake handheld into a quaint, sleek, lower-end homeboy.
Get it? Get what I'm saying? Every successive console has been taking underappreciated aspects of the previous console and expanding them to create a new device with that as the focus.
So what IS that feature for the Switch? I think it's the Toy-con. A clever way to create lightweight, disposable, inexpensive peripherals? Maybe. But then what's with the Toy-con VR goggles? First of all, Hi again Virtual Boy, we keep meeting. Why do we keep meeting. But second of all, why go to the trouble of creating a faux-headset for a console whose display is too low resolution to properly support VR?
Probably as a proof of concept, I'm guessing.
I've been looking at old Switch patents - One that grabs my attention is one where the controller is bezzled into the screen, in an oval shape, and the screen is the entire front of the device. Weird, right? Especially since the Switch looks nothing like that. What value is there in having the entire device be the screen? Perhaps it's to minimize the weight of the device when it's strapped to your face?
I've had a conspiracy since the Wii U came out that Nintendo has been itching to give the Virtual Boy a second chance. What I believe is that this "third branch" talk surrounding the DS, the 3DS, then the Switch, is a front to test concepts relating to VR in the newer, market-untested hardware. The original plan was to have three branches: a home console division, a handheld division, and a VR console division. However, the first two have met in happy unity, so the slot of a heavyweight, difficult-to-move setup console is open, now that the Switch has proven the value in trimming the fat on a home console until it is truly portable, not just a box with a handle. In the future, perhaps two generations from now, we'll see Nintendo split their handheld and console divisions again, with the Switch-style hybrid models acting as the handhelds.
The Switch 2, for lack of a better term, will be announced Q3 2024. It will be a device that at once trims the fat on the Switch further, being rid of the IR sensor and co-op baby-controllers in favor of an even more elegant, efficient, powerful, and ergonomic device that is even easier to accept the idea of strapping to your face. The Toy Con will be expanded - the new device will feature some new way to easily access a suite of on-demand cheap (or better yet, immaterial) peripherals, and more games will support VR/3D.
It will make early adopters and journalists invited to try it motion sick, and will sell modestly, propelled mainly by a hardcore audience that has basically only been itching for a beefier Switch for three years and counting.
