Gaming is in its big tech era

With the full reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 done and out of the way, I’ve had this overriding sense that gaming has truly entered its big tech era.

There’s certainly an overlap between the games industry and the general tech industry; after all, it’s all just hardware and software. But, I’ve always felt this divide between the two industries. When one was black turtlenecks, the other was a Hexen t-shirt; when one was neon blue or waggle-controls, the other is Starlight aluminum and Pencils.

Gaming has, for the most part, been about play from the beginning. New consoles are sold on graphics and performance, but at the end of the day, it’s almost always been about access to the new games: new stories to experience, new types of gameplay, new types of art to see.

Tech used to be like that too. You’d upgrade a computer or a smartphone for new capabilities or access to the latest software. Computing power would grow rapidly, hardware cycles allowing people to do things they only dreamt of five years prior.

But, while the tech industry continues to push processing speed and graphics performance higher and higher up the graph, tech has moved past the paradigm shifting upgrade cycle to what feels like incremental growth. The difference between an M1 Mac and a M4 Mac is huge…but not to a normal person who watches YouTube and scrolls Bluesky. Smartphone camera tech is incredible…but it has been for a few years now. We’ve gone from collaborative apps to a calculator on a watch.

The focus is no longer on what exciting thing you can do with a phone or computer you couldn’t before, it’s that it does what you’ve been doing, just probably marginally faster or marginally better. It's revolution, not evolution.

We even see form factors barely changing from the major manufacturers: I challenge you to look at a Surface laptop today and from five years ago and tell me which is newer. The iPhone, the Pixel, even the unique-looking Nothing Phone all look basically the same as previous iterations.

And you can see these tech companies battling this appearance of stagnation too. Every year there’s a new, outlandish screen you can fold into a paper crane or something. The last few iterations of major manufacturers have punted on useful iterations, instead doubling down on the buzzword of the day: AI. It’s all so…samey.

Now, with the full reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2, it feels like gaming’s transition to the tech industry’s cadence is complete.

The Nintendo Switch 2 is an exciting announcement. If you tuned into the Nintendo Direct on April 2nd, you would’ve seen a ton of game announcements and some classic Nintendo charm: a USB-C camera? Mouse controls?

But, by the end of all the reveals and the demos, you saw a lot of familiar things: 2017’s biggest game now has a $70 Switch 2 edition, SD cards, but faster, and a nearly identical UI. For all the magnets, Chat buttons, and 4k 60fps tech specs, the gaming industry has waited years for an upgraded Switch only to get…well, exactly that.

It’s just a Nintendo Switch, but better. Just like the PS5, for all its bombast and bluster, is a better PS4 Pro. Or the Xbox Series consoles are just better Xbox Ones. Or the iPhone 16 is a slightly better iPhone 15.

Nintendo has felt like the last hold out in the race for fun console design hijinx and, while they’ve always made the weirdest choices, whether it’s nunchucks or making you voice chat through an app, you could always expect something weird from them. But the Switch 2 is mostly what everyone expected and wanted: safe. The most outlandish “Nintendo” choice you could argue is a USB-C camera or 8 frames a second game streaming to your friend.

And that’s not to rag only on Nintendo. Xbox and PlayStation have been hoeing down this row for years now. Better hard drives, better processors, but really, just more of the same. Same UIs, same games, repackaged again and again, in basically the same black and white boxes.

The greatest innovations in gaming since 2017 when the first Nintendo Switch came out is probably the Steam Deck, a PC in the form factor of the Nintendo Switch. Yes yes, graphics have gotten better and performance has improved; AI improvements like DLSS have helped a ton, but the gaming industry—just like the tech industry—is coalescing. Revolution, not evolution.

Which makes sense: after the less-than-stellar sales of the WiiU, Nintendo has had 8 years of massive success, enjoying the success that comes from smart, innovative design and long tail growth from lowering the barriers for indies and third parties. That’s only really possible because of that coalescing: porting and selling games becomes easier (and more profitable) when the platforms are more similar.

But the downside is where we are now: this massive storyline for the past two or three years of “when is the Switch Pro or Switch 2 coming out?” ends leaving me feeling kinda bored. Sure, price plays a part in that: $299 for a Switch felt good in 2017, but $450 now doesn’t feel quite as nice. And yeah, the games look good, but I already have too many games to play on my other incremental consoles. The realm of innovative game design seems to have fallen to indies, most of which don’t require the power of a PS5’s hard drive, a 5090, or yeah, a Nintendo Switch 2.

Much like the latest tech keynotes, the gaming industry has settled into incremental growth; arbitrary charts with lines going up, expecting an increasingly strapped for cash consumer to believe those gains will matter. Which is fine, maybe that new GPU will spit out a few more frames, but it’s just not exciting.

For now, the Switch 2 falls into the same category for me as getting a new video card or the PS5 Pro: maybe someday, but for now, I think I’m good.

Honestly, the most damning thing of this shift is that, now, after almost every gaming company has traded in their Hexen T-shirts for leather jackets, and their neon colors for space black, I’m left looking at the heinous Playstation 5 industrial design and thinking to myself, “well, at least they got weird with it.”