Nintendo officially confirms Switch 2 is backward compatible with Switch games

After its Corporate Management Policy Briefing, Nintendo confirmed on Twitter that Nintendo Switch games would remain playable on “the successor to Nintendo Switch,” which most are currently calling Switch 2.

The entire Management Policy Briefing, available on Nintendo’s website, also describes the current status of Nintendo in the console hardware market, highlighting the 146 million units sold of the Nintendo Switch Family and that “more software has been played on Nintendo Switch than on any other Nintendo hardware.” The full 59-page PDF goes pretty in-depth on sales data and other historical information, confirming that the current Nintendo Switch Online service (as well as Music, etc) will continue with the Nintendo Switch 2’s release.

Now, if you’re from the Sony or Microsoft side of console compatibility, this news likely does not surprise you very much. Microsoft Xbox has maintained superb backward compatibility, including FPS Boost and Resolution Boosting functionality, for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games played on Xbox One or Xbox Series S/X. Sony PlayStation’s backward compatibility practices have been more limited since PS3 (which supported all past consoles). Still, PlayStation 5 does support PS4 titles near-perfectly, and a fair few PS2 and PS1 games are even playable through emulation. However, PS3 is relegated to cloud streaming on PS4 and PS5, much to the chagrin of PlayStation gamers.

Nintendo’s backward compatibility has historically been pretty good…until the Nintendo Switch. The prior console, Nintendo Wii U, could play games off discs from Wii and GameCube and had access to a Virtual Console that covered nearly all the remaining gaps in Nintendo’s past libraries. The prior handheld, Nintendo 3DS, could also play Nintendo DS titles— though no model of 3DS could play Game Boy Advance and other pre-dual screen Nintendo handheld games.

It wasn’t until Nintendo Switch, which converged Nintendo’s handheld and home console families and also changed from PowerPC to Arm CPU cores, that Nintendo entirely eliminated last-gen backward compatibility. Fortunately, it seems the Switch and its accessible Nvidia-powered mobile hardware have been successful enough for Nintendo to stick with this new scheme, and that means people buying games for Switch today won’t have to worry about what to play on Switch 2 when it arrives.

Hopefully, this also means that titles otherwise crippled by Nintendo’s original hardware, like Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, will now be playable above 60 FPS without the emulation software that Nintendo is so dedicated to killing— likely in part because like Dolphin could emulate GameCube and Wii, unhindered Switch emulators could likely emulate Switch 2, as well.