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The Switch is running on fumes. It might not be gong out with a whimper, but the needle is past empty. The 2024 release calendar was spotty at best, and even some of the more notable games that did come to the handheld hybrid, of which there were strikingly few, struggled to run on the nearly eight-year-old tech. Eight years, incidentally, is almost the stretch of time between the launch of the SNES and the PlayStation 2.
Nintendo has found a way to keep the Switch alive—just barely—heading into 2025, but this year mostly felt like being in line at the DMV, waiting for a glimpse of the Switch 2 only for the office to close just before you got called to the front desk. While everyone else was focused on the future, Nintendo was stubbornly attached to the Switch’s present, going so far as to wage an all-out war on Switch emulation enthusiasts and ROM pirates alike to stop the platform from completely transforming into a hacker’s paradise.
2024 was most notable for what we didn’t see or get than for any actual moves or announcements Nintendo made. No news about the Switch 2, other than it will be revealed in the next few months and will be backwards compatible with the existing one. No major Mario or Zelda game; instead we got two great but flawed smaller spin-offs from those franchises. No major changes to the Switch itself, as best evidenced by how much of a laggy slopfest the eShop still is. Not even a price drop for the $300 portable gaming tablet from 2017.
Instead, the Switch’s 2024 was best spent continuing to play the best indie releases around, almost all of which came to Switch. It was also a good year to continue exploring in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom which, almost two years later, is still the system’s most ambitious and sprawling achievement. Anyone getting a Switch for the first time this holiday season ahead of the Switch 2 announcement might elicit pity, if not for the fact that Nintendo’s current console still has one of the best catalogs ever assembled in the history of gaming.
The Hardware
What’s left to say about the Nintendo Switch? The promise it offers of gaming on the go or on a big display is as compelling as ever, though its ability to truly deliver a smooth and seamless gaming experience has eroded with time. The difference between how even mid-range to smaller games perform on Switch versus other platforms like PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC has only continued to grow. Framerate hiccups, visual detail, and loading times have all gotten worse, while rival portables like the Steam Deck and Asus Rog Ally offer fewer tradeoffs at a slightly higher price, at least when it comes to third-party ports and indie releases.
And whither the Switch 2? Nintendo’s much-speculated-about successor has yet to be revealed but, if an ongoing torrent of alleged leaks are to be taken seriously, appears to be a more straightforward upgrade to the existing hardware than Nintendo’s done in quite some time. Whatever gimmicks it may offer, like magnetized Joy-Con that stick to the side of the screen rather than sliding on, don’t seem to be central to the pitch of the new console. It might even be called the Nintendo Switch 2.
I’m not supposed to be spending this section on the state of the current Switch writing about the future one, but it’s a more accurate depiction of what most of 2024 has felt like for current Switch owners: pinning for what’s behind the red curtain as we growing increasingly impatient and frustrated with what’s already in our hands. As for things Nintendo actually did announce this year, there was a clock. It’s called Alarmo and it uses motion sensors to serenade users with video game music. Reviewers got their hands on it early but the actual thing won’t ship until early 2025. Fans did get a gold, Zelda-themed Switch Lite this year. It’s probably the best-looking special edition one yet.
The Software
Although the Switch hardware is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, the UI, interface, and general feel of actually navigating the home screen, eShop, and app-only features has grown increasingly grim. It’s sluggish, poorly optimized, and messy. The sleekness of the central row of tiles belies a stark lack of options when it comes to customization or getting any kind of meaningful information about your system, games, or the wider Nintendo ecosystem at a quick glance.
The eShop is a special point of pain. I quietly sigh every time I have to open the store to go and buy a game, check what’s on sale, or try to see what just came out. It feels like it takes a minor marathon for the store to boot up, and then even longer for the actual parts of it to individually load. Finally getting into the shop is just the start of the headaches, with shovelware and cheap rip-offs of famous games crammed throughout the catalog as you scroll. It’s not great, and it doesn’t help that Nintendo has seemed very unresponsive to the legitimate issues with it. It’s an ominous sign for how the digital purchasing experience may or may not end up changing when it comes to the Switch 2.
The current console did get one tiny update to its feature set in 2024, but it was mostly just aimed at fixing an existing bug. October’s firmware update 19.0.1 made it so that games will still download when the console goes into sleep mode, a major boon to players buying a game at midnight and then waking up the next morning to see that it still hadn’t finished installing, and a good indicator overall of just how much Nintendo’s attention has moved beyond the current system.
Instead of upgrading the current system, Nintendo spent most of 2024 vigorously threatening legal action against anyone making it possible to emulate Switch games elsewhere. It reached a settlement to have the creators of Yuzu, an emulator popular on competing PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, abandon the software and take it offline. It did the same with another Switch emulator called Ryujinx. It sued people accused of pirating games or even just streaming them. It had Github take down backups and went after Switch Reddit groups. Some of it may have been a response to claims of one million copies of Tears of the Kingdom being pirated when it launched. The renewed crackdown could also be an attempt to lock things down ahead of the Switch 2’s launch and avoid a repeat of how quickly homebrew enthusiasts managed to jailbreak its predecessor.
Network & Services
Nintendo Switch Online has continued to expand. A parade of Game Boy Advance classics added throughout 2024 included Golden Sun 1 and 2, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords, and Metroid Zero Mission. Mother 3 even came to the service, though only in Japan. An eclectic batch of retro games joined the rest of the catalog as well, from Super R-Type on SNES to Vectorman on Sega Genesis. Xbox Game Studios brought over a bunch of games like Killer Instinct and Perfect Dark. And the original Game Boy library was inundated with Mega Man and Donkey Kong Country games.
It’s an impressive offering across both the $20-a-year base service and the $50-a-year Expansion Pack add-on, though whether it’s still worth the actual money remains debatable. A big appeal of the Expansion Pack was access to new DLCs like the additional Mario Kart 8 Deluxe courses, but as Nintendo first-party releases have stalled and its online multiplayer games get quickly abandoned, that particular perk has languished. It’s also still a major blow to Nintendo’s retro offerings that none of the games can be purchased separately as Sony now allows with its PlayStation Classics. It’s 2024 and fans still have to pay $50 a year to rent The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on a Nintendo 64 emulator.
However, the biggest addition to Switch Online this year wasn’t a game at all. It was a Nintendo Music streaming service that lets fans play game soundtracks from their phones, like Donkey Kong Country 2‘s enigmatic Bramble Blast and the chiptune title music for the original Metroid on the NES. If only fans could also buy that music and download it DRM-free. Additionally, Nintendo used Switch Online to launch a playtest for a secret project that seems like a mashup of an MMO and Minecraft. The service has also been used to offer week-long free trials of various eShop games like Cursed Golf and Vampire Survivors. Switch Online is more valuable than ever, but still lacks the one thing its competitors have going for it: access to a Netflix-like library of new games.
The Games
Nintendo is masterful when it comes to making an off year feel like it’s still full of big games. The Switch’s 2024 calendar was a mix of remakes and smaller spin-offs buoyed by a good year for indie games. The first half of the year ramped up with Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Princess Peach: Showtime!, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It then brought things home with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Super Mario Party Jamboree, and Mario & Luigi: Brothership.
The quantity was there in 2024 for sure, but it definitely felt like a second-string year while Nintendo rested its starters. Echoes of Wisdom experimented with really neat and novel ideas but fell just short of greatness. Mario & Luigi: Brothership was a great RPG-lite sequel that didn’t quite manage to truly transform the series the way other Switch games have for their respective franchises. The best game Nintendo put on the Switch in 2024 was arguably Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a remake of a two-decade-old GameCube game that, in another universe, would have come to the platform without the HD upgrade simply the via Switch Online back catalog.
Fortunately, the Switch also had another banner year for indie releases to fill in the gaps. Some of 2024’s top games—Balatro, 1000xResist, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Animal Well, Arco, Botany Manor, Thank Goodness You’re Here, and Neva—all arrived in a timely manner, even if their ports to other consoles were delayed. Microsoft’s multiplatform push also saw the Switch get Pentiment, the excellent Renaissance-era murder mystery RPG, while some third-party GOTY contenders like Unicorn Overlord and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown were present day-and-date.
The Switch’s 2024 library didn’t reach the same heights as it has in past years, but there was still plenty to play, an incredible feat for a console that should have been replaced long ago. And there’s still more coming. Ports of Donkey Kong Country Returns and Xenoblade Chronicles X arrive early in 2025. Metroid Prime 4, announced ages ago, is also still set to come to the platform, as will Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the next game in the hit franchise after an unprecedented year off from new Pokémon games. Nintendo is clearly saving its best for the launch of the Switch 2. In that context, a quiet year for the current Switch was still way better than it had any right to be.
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