Nintendo’s Switch 2 is Not Truly Compatible With Compatibility According to DoesItPlay? Game Preservationist
When Nintendo announced the Switch 2 on April 2, 2025, it made a big deal about backwards compatibility with the original Switch. However, now that the new console is out, the company still has a lot of work to do in this regard as issues are still being reported with the compatibility of Switch titles.
DoesItPlay? and Nintendo Revised, two game preservation organizations, discovered during the evening of the release of Switch 2 on June 5 that there are issues with original Switch games running on the new console. Although Nintendo has supposedly ensured almost all original games are now compatible with the new system, there are still concerns related to game preservation.
“You can get the impression that everything is purely a business for them (Nintendo). And their IPs are their livelihood, which they will and have to protect at all cost. Not sure that goes together with the idea of preservation, which ideally aims for eternal, public access,” Clemens Istel, the owner and head admin of DoesItPlay?, told Eneba and added: “If the only option to play a Switch 1 game is the Switch 2, and those downloads aren’t supported, we have an issue.”
A Miraculous Turnaround
As previously reported, when the Switch 2 was announced around 80% of original Switch games weren’t fully compatible with the new system. Meaning, some may run but with serious issues like missing textures or other data, or simply refuse to load at all. All affected titles were from third-party studios; Nintendo apparently fixed its own games first.
The developers noted in an interview around the time that they knew they had their work cut out for them as not only were there around 10,000 games still to test, but the Switch 2 also has completely different interior components to its predecessor.
“When we first started Switch 2 development, the focus was on enhancing its performance as hardware, namely, expanding its capacity. So, compatibility was a lower priority,” said Takuhiro Dohta, Senior Director of the Entertainment Planning And Development Department.
“Switch 2 doesn’t contain any Switch hardware,” added Kouichi Kawamoto, Producer, Entertainment Planning & Development Department.
However, it did look as if things were turning around, as by May 27 the amount of games that weren’t fully compatible dropped to around 30%. That showed that a feasible amount of work had been performed to ensure backwards compatibility, within a month and a half.
Fast forward to June 5, the actual release date of the Switch 2, and games without full compatibility had reached a miraculous almost zero percent, with clear examples of non-working titles being those reliant on hardware not compatible with Switch 2 like Toy Con kits for example.
Nintendo has, throughout this testing process, also provided regularly updated PDFs of games with issues. At the time of writing these are broken into two parts: titles that prevent progress, including those with start-up issues; and games with issues that have been resolved or are due to be via a forthcoming patch.
The former list includes 155 titles while the latter includes almost 300 games. Some are in-house Nintendo titles, despite the compatibility graph and page showing almost 100% work okay. DoesItPlay? has also highlighted multiple Nintendo in-house Switch titles that are currently broken on Switch 2.
The games with serious issues are all uniformly listed by Nintendo with “This issue is being investigated,” aside from a few references related to whether a European, American, or Korean version are affected.
The other document does note issues, such as “Game behavior may vary from Nintendo Switch. Users may experience graphics problems in some areas,” and “The game
may occasionally shut down when the user performs certain inputs in specific areas,” although there are no actual specifics listed, and most games are accompanied by “Previously identified issues have been resolved with an update.”
Continuing Issues And How These Relate to Game Preservation
It would be easy to assume that Nintendo has got everything under control, especially since backwards compatibility has been a known issue from the very start. However, the Switch 2 engineer’s statement that this wasn’t a priority does raise a red flag.
DoesItPlay?’s Patreon post about this issue also expressed concern as to what exactly is going on: “At first, this seemed like individual cases. As it turns out, it is systemic. The issue affects all games that have received a ‘Switch 2 upgrade’ in the recent days.”
Istel told Eneba that the preservation issue has a general part and a Switch specific part and, in general, any online dependency is a hurdle for preservation.
“Will the necessary logins be supported in the future? How long do companies maintain server infrastructure beyond the life of a product? Eventually, business decisions will end these services,” Istel said.
Planned obsolescence is an integral part of most technology, since a business likely wouldn’t last long if they only ever need to sell one version of a product. However, there’s planning for future technology and then there’s making it so a product can be purposefully turned into a paperweight, which is what Nintendo can do to the Switch 2, if users aren’t careful.
The Future is Uncertain
At the time of writing, DoesItPlay? were diligently testing Switch games on the Switch 2 for other possible compatibility issues. Istel expressed his concerns as to whether these could be fixed quickly after encouraging people via X (Twitter) not to sell their original Switch console.
“Don’t sell your old Switch just yet, if you care about preservation and offline play. A potentially very worrying issue with backwards compatibility has come up in another group. Investigating,” DoesItPlay? tweeted.
The organisation expanded on this on its official Patreon page, accompanied by a growing list of affected titles. “Last night the Nintendo Revised group and a member of our Discord discovered physical Nintendo Switch 1 games that would not run on Switch 2 without an additional patch,” DoesItPlay? said. “This happened despite the console being on the latest firmware, which unlocks the backwards compatibility feature.”
This lack of regard to its own customers suggests that Nintendo also isn’t too bothered about preserving access to its system’s games, outside of selling them. However, PlayStation has also demonstrated a lack of interest in backwards compatibility.
Istel pointed out that several AAA titles from Sony’s PS4 don’t run properly on PS5, without updates and if the company’s attitude towards backwards compatibility doesn’t change, we’re likely to see more of these issues in the future.
“If PlayStation’s backwards compatibility is anything to go by, we will encounter more games that have issues out of the box, despite not being on these lists of games that have issues,” Istel said. “Those lists don’t account for unpatched games. Several high profile Sony and AAA titles from the PS4 simply don’t work properly on PS5 without updates.”
The issue of game preservation and backwards compatibility will remain for as long as there’s no business incentive to care more about IPs and consoles falling out of favor or simply being replaced with better technology.
Nintendo clearly cares about their IPs and protecting them, but it does come across as a bit strange when players are given an option to download software to play Switch games on Switch 2, when this should be automatically applied. Making it a choice means users can, accidentally or otherwise, cancel the option and potentially render those games unplayable.
“I don’t know if it can be sorted. If it has to be a game-side patch and they won’t show the game otherwise to not lose face, then that’s that. Hopefully, this is just a mistake and they accidentally ticked a box to make the patch mandatory. Would still beg the question why the option exists in the first place, though.”
