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Comment by zzbzq | Hacker News Reader

Actually, just straight-up re-releasing remasters of the games might be a way to make backward compatibility work as a business model. I'm really cynical that, while the consumers in threads like this widely consider the backward compatibility to be an obvious choice, it just doesn't make business sense in a world where certain companies in particular make such a killing by perpetually re-selling the same games back to the same people over and over again. It's too lucrative and too effective. But if you can make the system backward compatible and still sell them those games a second time anyway, it's a win/win.

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You can see them doing this with the WiiU lineup, which it turns out in hindsight had a lot of good games for it. But this works for them precisely because "nobody" bought those games, and there was still a good amount of time between rereleases.

I don't think Nintendo is dim enough to release a Switch 2 next year and try to re-release Breath of the Wild for it.

In fact I'll go out on a limb and suggest that based on previous console lifecycles, and the way the 1st party support tends to trail off towards the end of the cycle so they can dev on the new console so it can have a release line up, and the way that (current) Switch releases are powering through like there isn't a new console coming out in a year, that we're looking at a very high probability of a 100% backwards compatible console here. Otherwise I think they'd be holding more of this stuff back for the next release.

With the way consoles work nowadays it'd be pretty easy for them to release a new engine for BotW/TotK for a Switch 2 that just comes down as a patch like any other when you plug the cartridge in. And you hardly even need a new engine just to push out a higher res display, as emulators prove.

I have to imagine the Steam Deck playing in the same price bracket (the refurb base model was going for $320), Nintendo _may_ feel the pressure to support backwards compatibility. Why buy a new device and Breath of the Wild over again when you could just get a Deck and play a large % of ever PC game to have ever existed?

Nintendo is also in a different position this time around, as the WiiU, DS, 3DS, etc had such different hardware that remaking a game for the Switch was essentially a necessity, whereas I expect the Switch 2 to be a Switch with faster hardware.

> Why buy a new device and Breath of the Wild over again when you could just get a Deck and play a large % of ever PC game to have ever existed?

...and still be able to play Breath of the Wild on it. (Although, to be fail, the mainstream user probably won't be doing that.)

Day 1 Switch owner and very early Deck owner. I don’t play with the deck enough because a lot of stuff is fiddly once you get away from the Steam store. I’ve seen lots of talk about emulators and things but it’s not terribly easy to set up.

if you enjoy terrible performance for switch games, playing them on a SD is one way to do it

Many of the new ps4 titles have "free upgrade" to the ps5 version on offer, for instance Armored Core 6. However, the largest difference between versions seems to be frame rate and resolution. I wonder if Nintendo would consider that for actual graphical upgrades.

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