On the eve of the Switch 2 announcement, the gaming industry is on edge

The Nintendo Switch 2 is expected to be announced on Thursday, according to industry rumors. And on the eve of this announcement, the gaming industry is watching because there is so much at stake.

We don’t have much information on this rumor, but the implications are interesting.

In terms of console sales, Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion and industry observer, featured in the 220-page website. that Nintendo gave a lot of growth in the past two generations to console game sales, as the Switch in eight years has sold more than 146 million units and 1.3 billion games to date.

The products are getting scarce and that is why Nintendo is introducing new systems. All industries have been hit hard, with 34,000 jobs cut over the past 2.5 years in the gaming industry. Business revenues are down, mobile game growth is down, pandemics are on the rise, and business is down at a time when other industries are booming. For this year, it may be up to Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI to save gaming sales.

Simply put, the gaming industry needs Nintendo’s switch 2 to be more successful than Nintendo.

Ball said the Switch benefits Nintendo in particular. Switch users buy 25% to 33% fewer games than PlayStation/Xbox owners, and more than half of sales are Nintendo games versus 10% for PS/Xbox.

Switch sales are not from new players, but from lobbying and hand sales. Both PlayStation and Xbox Series X/S sales fell after 49 months of sales. The Switch 2 should sell more to solve those problems.

For the Switch 2 to succeed, however, it will have to compete with SteamDeck, which, as a PC version, has helped the PC gain market share in recent years over consoles. And the biggest player of Steam now in Asia and especially in China, Ball said.

As an aside, Digital Trends reported that the processor in Nintendo’s new console will be Nvidia’s T234 processor called the T239. Based on the octo-core ARM A78C CPU, it is part of the graphics card based on Nvidia’s RTX 30-series Ampere architecture. I’m curious to know if this will make game development on the platform more difficult or easier. The Switch 2 hardware will be the same as the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and SteamDeck. This means that companies won’t have to create different versions of games to have a title on the Switch 2.

But we’ll see if that’s how the reality is, since PlayStation/Xbox devices are based on AMD and Nintendo is also using Nvidia.

“PS and Xbox are x86 processors and run Windows as an OS and use DirectX 11 with slight differences in PS,” said Jon Peddie, graphics analyst at Jon Peddie Research, in a message to GamesBeat. “Nintendo runs Linux-as its OS, and the API is proprietary. There is not much opportunity, or desire as far as I know, to have the ability to go beyond the platform. Nintendo is supporting the work that Nvidia has done in the automotive area in terms of software and technology.”