‘Nintendo is losing their identity’: Shuhei Yoshida says Switch 2’s focus on power is what other companies would do
The former SIE president feels Switch 2 is uncharacteristic of a company that thrives on innovation
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida says he thinks Nintendo is “losing their identity” with Switch 2 by focusing on power over innovation.
Yoshida left Sony in January after 31 years at the company, where he helped launch the original PlayStation and served as its president of SIE Worldwide Studios between 2008 and 2019.
In an interview with Easy Allies, Yoshida was asked what he thought about Nintendo‘s Switch 2 Direct, and he replied that he thought it was a departure from the level of innovation typically expected of Nintendo when it comes to new hardware.
“To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo,” Yoshida explained. “In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion. For me they are always about creating some new experience, like designing hardware and games together to create something, [an] amazing new experience.
“But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It’s the larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120fps. They even had a hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right?
“And because it’s a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is ‘we made things better’, and that’s something other companies have been doing all the time.”
Yoshida added that while the idea of a Switch with more powerful is undeniably a good thing because it enables certain third-party series to arrive on Nintendo hardware for the first time, he feels this is less of an enticing prospect for players who have multiple consoles and have already played those games.
Special guest Shuhei Yoshida gets real about the Switch 2 pic.twitter.com/CzZYPnTtue
— Easy Allies (@EasyAllies) April 14, 2025
“Of course it’s a more powerful Switch, so it’s great if your gaming was only on Nintendo hardware, [and] it’s the first time for you to be able to play amazing games like Elden Ring for the first time,” he explained.
“But for us, the ‘core’ gamers who own multiple hardware and play games on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, the games they showed off, especially from third parties – in theory, it’s amazing to have all these all-stars of industry games on Nintendo hardware – however, what they showed was like… ‘ooh’.”
Switch 2 is not entirely without innovation, the most obvious example being the addition of mouse controls to the Joy-Con 2 controllers, making Switch 2 the first console to include mouse functionality as standard.
Other new additions to the hardware include a Game Chat feature with screen sharing abilities, and a Game Share feature where players can send their game to others nearby to take part in multiplayer with a single copy of the game.
Switch 2 is released on Thursday, June 5.
