On the eve of the Switch 2 announcement, there’s a lot at stake in the gaming industry

The Nintendo Switch 2 is expected to be announced on Thursday, according to rumors circulating throughout the industry. On the eve of this announcement, the gaming industry is watching closely because there is a lot at stake.

We have no inside information on these rumours, but the implications are interesting.

As for console sales Matthew Ball, Epyllion CEO and industry leader, pointed out in a 220-page slide deck Nintendo has provided most of the growth in the past two generations of game console sales, with the eight-year-old Switch selling more than 146 million units and 1.3 billion games to date.

These sales started to decline and that’s why Nintendo launched the new system. The entire industry has been a mess, with 34,000 jobs cut in the last 2.5 years in the gaming industry. Venture investment has declined, mobile gaming growth has stalled, the pandemic boom has faded, and the industry has shrunk at a time when some other industries are still growing. For this year, it may be up to Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI to rescue game sales.

In short, the gaming industry needs the Nintendo Switch 2 to succeed more than Nintendo does.

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

Switch sales are not from net new players, but from cannibalization of living room and portable console sales. Sales of both PlayStation and Xbox Series The Switch 2 will have to sell a lot to make up for these problems.

However, for the Switch 2 to win, it will have to compete with SteamDeck, which has helped the PC, as a type of PC, gain market share in recent years over consoles. Paul said Steam’s largest player base is now in Asia and China in particular.

Additionally, Digital Trends reported that the processor in Nintendo’s new console will be the Nvidia T234 mobile processor called the T239. Based on the combination of ARM A78C octa-core CPU and dedicated GPU based on Nvidia’s RTX 30 series Ampere architecture. I’m very interested to see if this will make cross-platform game development more difficult or easier. The Switch 2’s hardware will likely be similar in capability to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series This means that companies won’t have to create entirely separate versions of the game to run a title on Switch 2.

But we’ll see if that turns out to be the case, given that PlayStation/Xbox hardware is based on AMD and Nintendo is using Nvidia again.

“The PS and Xbox consoles are x86 processors and run Windows as the operating system and use DirectX 11 and a minor variant of it in PS,” Jon Peddie, a graphics analyst at Jon Peddie Research, said in a message to GamesBeat. “Nintendo runs its own operating system similar to Linux, and the API is proprietary. There’s not much opportunity, or desire as far as I can tell, to have cross-platform capability. Nintendo is benefiting from the work they’ve done It has Nvidia in the automotive space when it comes to display software and technology.