According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
I suspect the “you will keep your * game library” is missing the “*compatible*”.
Making a game working on a new hardware is a big amount of work, especially for tiny teams.
So ether the softwares are binary compatible (a Switch binary work on the new hardware without modification), ether we will lost many games.
Wait and see…
As a Metroid Prime Remaster buyer, I’m a little sad to realize we will maybe not see the 2 and 3 on Switch. :-(
While you never know with these marketing talks, but I am guessing “keeping your game library” doesn’t make sense if the system is not backwards compatible. Nintendo has good history with backwards compatibility, so I am hopeful, but you never know with Nintendo.
Right now its all speculation though. Let’s wait and see.