With each passing day, the rumored Nintendo Switch 2 feels ever more real as developers see the machine in private meetings and tech manufacturers rush to produce more LCD screens. The Mario maker is cooking up something for holiday 2024, though the company has remained as tightlipped as ever about a successor to the seven-year-old handheld-console hybrid. But other game companies are (kind of) talking about the speculated system, including EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who was asked about the rumored Switch 2 in an investor meeting.
According to Eurogamer, investors recently questioned Wilson on how the Switch 2—or whatever Nintendo ends up calling it—would impact EA’s business. Wilson said that he could “absolutely not comment on anything that has not been announced or acknowledge it in any way” but did share his thoughts on the promise of new platforms, generally.
What I would say to the extent that platforms over the course of the last 20 years have come out and offered improved CPU, GPU, memory, battery life, screen resolution…where we’re able to deliver more immersion for our players, particularly around our biggest franchises like FC, like Madden, like Battlefield, like Apex that has typically been very good for our business. Our players’ ability to really experience our games at the highest level has typically worked out very well for us. And so without commenting at all on anything around Nintendo or the Switch, I would just say new platforms are good for us, where new platforms offer improved CPU, GPU, memory, battery life, screen resolution that typically is a plus for our particular portfolio of games and the community that plays them.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is expected to be more powerful than the 2017 version of the console. According to Tom’s Hardware, the successor system should leverage Nvidia’s Ampere CPU and GPU, while the predecessor featured a custom Tegra processor that was capable but not particularly powerful. The SoC (system-on-a-chip) speculated to be slotted into the Nintendo Switch 2 should have a 128-bit memory interface and up to 102GB/s of bandwidth to LPDDR5 RAM, as reported by Ars Technica via Digital Foundry’s analysis. This would mark a huge leap in performance, with the SoC capable of achieving higher frame rates, which should make games like Tears of the Kingdom look better and load faster. While it’s totally possible that Nintendo could go the way of the Wii U and serve us something completely different than what’s currently rumored, if everything checks out the way that it is, then the Nintendo Switch 2 will, at the very least, be an improvement over its predecessor.
A variety of EA games are on the Nintendo Switch right now, including the aforementioned Apex Legends, as well as several FIFA games (and the rebranded FC titles),and popular indies like It Takes Two. Not everything EA develops is currently on the handheld-console hybrid—both Battlefield and Madden aren’t—but if a new, more powerful console debuts, we may see even more EA titles made available.
Kotaku has reached out to EA for comment.
The Nintendo Switch 2 might still be officially announced, but we’ve actually heard quite a bit about the console. It will reportedly feature an 8-inch LCD screen (which is bigger than the standards’s 6.2-inch display and the OLED’s 7-inch screen), will still be portable, and may include some form of backward compatibility. The Nintendo Switch 2 is very much sounding like the Nintendo Switch—but better.
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