But Switch has an unprecedented amount of the absolute lowest tier shovelware, you can probably cut that list in half, and that's being generous. Look into it sometime, Nintendo has virtually zero quality control. It's notoriously referred to as a Portendo Switch too, which is actually a good thing to me because I like older ports for convenience, but that's another big portion of its library. PS2's library is surprisingly high quality and low on old ports.
Receiving a lot of shovelware is par for the course for any system that achieves a very large install base, that's a disadvantage of a successful ecosystem. That was the case as well for the PS2's library of which its quality ranged all across the board as well, let's not pretend the PS2 catalog was The Elysian Fields of gaming where only the worthy were allowed entry. I still have vivid memories of browsing the second-hand section of video game stores with shelves stacked from top to bottom with some of the worst PS2 shovelware imaginable. (Anyone who recognizes the names Blast! Entertainment and Phoenix Games knows what I'm talking about.)
As you said having a lot of ports can be a good thing as well as that cemented the Switch as the go to machine to find a portable version of most of the games you wanted to play.
And we already see games like Sand Land and Visions of Mana, which you'd think would be a perfect fit, skipping Switch. They ain't AAA and are the kind of games perfectly at home there, but if I had to speculate it seems like they're just a little too ambitious for Switch but could've been tweaked to work if it was in their smaller budgets/deadlines. And not that I personally care much, but even games that do make it to Switch have significantly lower quality, again, usually games that don't have target the highest fidelity like Sonic Frontiers, which apparently is a mess of pop-in & low frame rates, which is probably more noticeable to people than the "bad" graphics.
It was easier earlier in the life of the Switch to fit scaled down version of new releases, that's not the case 7 years after the fact, the Switch's chipset wasn't even brand new when it launched, it was a 2 year old architecture at the time so that's a 9 year old mobile chip that managed to become the heart of the industry leading hardware and soon-to-be the most popular gaming system ever made. It is a miracle what this "little handheld that could" has become, it has been squeeze as far as it is going to go and it is beyond reason to expect new releases, even AA in its now sun-setting stage.
Point is, a repeat of that situation would be best mitigated by future-proofing Switch 2 a bit. Sure, maybe it'd be fine now, but I think we'd see the same hardware hindrances and limitations after a few years. Switch has quite a few "yeah, it's...technically on Switch" ports that got universally shit on for bad quality like Mortal Kombat, a game they apparently didn't even bother with a PS4 version of, yet they forced it onto the Switch.
It don't think at all that "future proofing" is within the realm of Nintendo's mindset. They stopped chasing that trend after the Gamecube, the Wii's success proved to them that they did not need a technological edge to succeed and that was reiterated again with the even more successful achievements of the Switch. (The WiiU was barely a speed bump for them that mostly was blamed to bad marketing). Nintendo's philosophy is "make it so it is good enough to run our own exclusive games, add a novel gimmick and that's is the only thing that matters. If third parties want a piece of the action, they will have to adapt." Nintendo is the "learn to code" meme taken to the extreme. Besides, this is doubly true considering they are a single-machine company now, a handheld machine at that, which in itself limits just how much graphical power can be packaged into a compact shell that runs off a battery and has to keep temperatures in check. There is just no way around the laws of physics and if the leaks about the Switch 2 are true, there is no much room to spare.
These are screenshots of the Switch compared to a dummy shell that is being used by accessory manufactures to make products for the Switch 2. The new unit is just about an inch bigger diagonally and about the same thickness as the old one. Nintendo is barely deviating from the original Switch's design. A lot of technological development can happen in 9 years, but let's not kid ourselves. the Switch 2 is not going to be a cutting edge device. The trend of both modern handhelds and GPUs has been to grow bigger and more power hungry, the Switch 2 looks like it is taking a more modest aproach.
But hell, it's Nintendo, so if they just have a strong 1st party lineup and anything close to Switch 1's 3rd party support it'll still probably do good, but I don't see it matching Switch 1's sales.
!00% in agreement regarding lineup and support. The only thing stopping it form being as successful as its predecessor is that now there are far more choices in the handheld space. When the original Switch launched Nintendo found itself without any real competition in that space. In some regards they might still have the unique edge by being the only ones that still sell games in physical cartridges while everything else is digital only.
But people don't buy Steam Deck for Vampire Hunters, it might be one of its top games but nobody went into it for that. People actually do want the big games there, much more than Nintendo. It still can run most of them at at least the lowest settings for now, but with growing exceptions. When it first launched I don't think there were many exceptions at all. There may be no rush for SD2, but there is a rush for Switch 2, and has been for a while.
Again, I'd be fine with these as they are if they kept getting support forever, but that's not the market reality.
People bought the Steam Deck because it became the easiest, most convenient, most cost effective way to experience PC gaming in a self contained portable device. While there is a section of players that want to play the latest releases on the Deck, realistically speaking there is no expectations of high fidelity on a portable. Instead it is the perfect machine to play less demanding games with reliability and convenience and let's not forget since it is a PC that can be tinkered with, it has become the go-to-all-in-one emulation machine of choice.
The rush for the Switch 2 is more than justified, again it is a very old machine packing repurposed older Tegra X1 silicon, the Steam Deck is 2 years old and the custom AMD silicon inside was brand new when it launched.
I don't know what to tell you about people expecting too much out of a handheld other than they are not being very realistic.
