The next generation of Nintendo hardware (which we still have to wait for the announcement of) will get ports, but it might not be for long.

When the hardware is released (which will most likely be around March 2025… the announcement is SURE to be made by the end of March, and Nintendo itself says so!), it will probably be able to compete with the Xbox Series S, so it’s not certain that games for the current console generation will need to be significantly scaled back, which is what currently needs to be done to get multiplatform games to work on the Nintendo Switch.

On the Moore’s Law Is Dead Broken Silicon podcast, Taylor Christensen and Jacob Sutton, two co-founders of Infuse Studio (Spirit of the North), talked about the next big N hardware. According to Sutton, if the leaked specs are credible, the Switch 2 could get a lot of ports and support, since the lowest common denominator or lowest current generation platform right now is the Xbox Series S. So it shouldn’t be too hard for developers to get their games running on Nintendo’s next-gen hardware.

But this will change later, as Nintendo will once again come out with its own new hardware in the middle of the generation (as it did with the Switch), meaning that when the PlayStation 6 and the new Xbox come out, it will be harder for developers to port their next-gen games. This is what happened with the Switch, as games running on Unreal Engine 4 had to be seriously rebooted, while Unreal Engine 5 makes porting seem almost impossible. According to Sutton, new hardware does not automatically solve problems (e.g. software that does not take full advantage of the hardware, e.g. Unreal Engine 5.4, which allows better multi-core usage).

The Nintendo Switch 2 hasn’t been announced yet, but this hardware is just like the PlayStation 5: we haven’t officially seen it yet, but everyone is talking about it…

Source: WCCFTech