The Nintendo Switch 2 is expected to be announced on Thursday, according to industry-wide rumors. And on the eve of that announcement, the gaming industry is watching closely because there’s a lot at stake.

We don’t have insider information on this rumor, but the implications are interesting.

In terms of console sales, Matthew Ball, CEO of Epyllion and industry watcher, found in a 220-page slide deck that Nintendo has provided most of the growth in the past two generations of game console sales, as the eight-year-old Switch has sold more than 146 million units and 1.3 billion games to date.

Sales began to decline and so Nintendo launched a new system. The entire industry is in a funk, with 34,000 jobs cut in the last 2.5 years in the gaming industry. Venture investment has declined, mobile gaming growth has stalled, the pandemic boom has fizzled, and the industry has shrunk at a time when other industries are still thriving. For this year, it may be up to Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI to save game sales.

In short, the gaming industry needs Nintendo’s Switch 2 to be a success for more than just Nintendo.

Ball says the Switch benefits Nintendo the most. Switch users buy 25% to 33% fewer games than PlayStation/Xbox owners, and more than half of sales are Nintendo games compared to 10% for PS/Xbox.

Switch sales are not from net new players, but from the cannibalization of living room and handheld console sales. PlayStation and Xbox Series X/S sales are the same after 49 months of sales. Had to sell the Switch 2 to make up for the problems.

In order for the Switch 2 to win, however, it will have to compete with SteamDeck, which, as a PC type, has helped the PC gain market share in recent years over consoles. And Steam’s biggest player base right now is in Asia and China in particular, Ball said.

On the other hand, Digital Trends reports that the processor of the new Nintendo machine is Nvidia’s T234 mobile processor called T239. Based on the octo-core ARM A78C CPU cluster and custom graphics unit based on Nvidia’s RTX 30-series Ampere architecture. I’m very interested to know if this will make cross-platform game development more difficult or easier. The hardware for the Switch 2 will likely be similar in capabilities to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and the SteamDeck. That means companies don’t have to create completely different versions of a game to run a Switch 2 title.

But we’ll see if that’s what actually happened, because the PlayStation/Xbox hardware is based on AMD and Nintendo is using Nvidia again.

“PS and Xbox are x86 processors and run a Windows like OS and use DirectX 11 and a small variant of it on PS,” said Jon Peddie, graphics analyst at Jon Peddie Research, in a message to on GamesBeat. “Nintendo runs its own Linux-like OS, and the API is proprietary. There isn’t much opportunity, or desire as far as I can tell, to have cross-platform capability. Nintendo is taking advantage of the work that Nvidia has done in the automotive area in terms of display software and tech.