There’s a lot at stake for the gaming industry on the eve of the Switch 2 announcement

According to industry-wide rumors, the Nintendo Switch 2 will be announced on Thursday. And on the eve of this announcement, the gaming industry is watching closely because there is so much at stake.

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

As for console sales, Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion and industry insider, stated this in a 220-page slide deck that Nintendo accounted for most of the sales growth in the last two generations of gaming consoles, as the eight-year-old Switch has sold more than 146 million units and 1.3 billion games to date.

These sales have gradually declined and that is why Nintendo is launching the new system. The entire industry was in crisis, with 34,000 jobs lost in the games industry in the last 2.5 years. Venture investment has declined, mobile gaming growth has stalled, the pandemic boom has stalled, and the industry has shrunk while some other industries are still growing. This year, it may be up to the Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI to save game sales.

In short: The gaming industry needs Nintendo’s Switch 2 to be a success for more than just Nintendo.

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

The Switch’s sales come not from new players, but from cannibalizing sales of living room and handheld consoles. Both PlayStation and Xbox Series X/S sales are down after 49 months of sales. The Switch 2 will have to sell a lot to make up for these problems.

For the Switch 2 to win, however, it will have to contend with the SteamDeck, which, as a type of PC, has helped the PC gain market share on consoles in recent years. And Steam’s largest player base is currently in Asia and particularly China, Ball said.

Apart from this, Digital Trends reported that the processor in the new Nintendo device will be Nvidia’s T234 mobile processor, dubbed T239. Based on an octo-core ARM A78C CPU cluster and a custom graphics unit based on Nvidia’s RTX 30 series Ampere architecture. I’m very curious to see whether this will make cross-platform game development harder or easier. The hardware for the Switch 2 will likely have similar performance to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the SteamDeck. This means companies don’t have to create entirely separate versions of a game in order to run a title on the Switch 2.

But we’ll see if that’s the reality as the PlayStation/Xbox hardware is based on AMD and Nintendo is back on Nvidia.

“The PS and Xbox are x86 processors and run a Windows-like operating system and use DirectX 11 and a light variant of it in the PS,” Jon Peddie, graphics analyst at Jon Peddie Research, said in a message to GamesBeat. “Nintendo runs its own Linux-like operating system and the API is proprietary. As far as I can tell, there is neither much opportunity nor desire to have cross-platform capabilities. “Nintendo is leveraging the work that Nvidia has done in the automotive space in terms of display software and technology.”