The Nintendo Switch successor will be backward compatible, according to Nintendo’s president

Nintendo’s next console, the successor to the Nintendo Switch, is right around the corner, and the company will most likely announce it at any moment. Fans are constantly wondering what features it’s going to have and, fortunately, we just received confirmation about one of the biggest ones.

The president of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa posted a special message on , in which he let people know that he announced that the successor of the Nintendo Switch will be backwards compatible on . But that’s not all, because he also confirmed that the Nintendo Switch Online service will be available on the next console as well.

, this is still a major win for both the company and its fans. After all, the Nintendo Switch was an extremely popular and successful console with an effective branding that worked quite well. Not to mention that the company sold a lot of software exclusive to it, so it would have been very frustrating for people if they couldn’t play their games on the system’s successor.

While it’s not without its flaws, the Nintendo Switch Online service has also worked efficiently for the company, since it let people connect to each other in order to play together online, while also giving them access to an extensive gallery of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Game Boy and GBA games and the recent Nintendo Music app. So it’s no surprise that the company decided to carry it over to its next console.

The Nintendo Switch itself wasn’t backwards compatible

This announcement has made people reminisce about the backwards compatibility of previous Nintendo systems, and the shared conclusion is that this company has an inconsistent history with this feature. Forꦓ example: The NES, the SNES and the Nintendo 64 were not backwards compatible, while the GameCube, Wii and Wii U could play games from previous consoles.

Backwards compatibility has been way more common on Nintendo handhelds, but it varied depending on the specific model and version. For example, the original Nintendo DS and the Nintendo DS Lite could play Game Boy Advance games, while subsequent versions couldn’t.

Weirdly enough, the Nintendo Switch isn’t backwards compatible with the Wii or Wii U at all. This is most likely because Nintendo wanted to distance itself from the Wii branding after the massive failure of its previous console, which resulted in the company porting most of the best Wii U games to Switch. This is a profitable practice that it’s still going strong to this day, seeing as it recently announced a Switch port of Xenoblade Chronicles X.