Should You Buy A Nintendo Switch In 2024?

Super Mario Bros. Wonder red OLED

The Nintendo Switch is about to enter its eighth year on the market, having first launched all the way back in 2017 — it simultaneously feels like such a long time ago and just yesterday. Given consoles usually start getting replaced by their successors after about this long, you might be wondering if it’s worth even buying a Switch at this point, or if you should hold off for whatever comes next.

There are a few reasons for and against both decisions, and unfortunately whether or not you should buy one is very much a “maybe” at this stage. But we’ll go through all of those reasons, and try to come up with a somewhat definitive answer by the end of this article.

Related: Top 10 Games to Play on Nintendo Switch

The biggest reason not to buy a Switch in 2024 is in anticipation of the Switch 2 — or whatever Nintendo ends up calling it. If rumors are to be believed, the Switch 2 is launching at some point in 2024, and is set to be much more powerful than its predecessor, so it may be worth saving your money and putting it towards the newer, better console.

It’s also likely that once the Switch 2 launches, developer support – both first-party and third-party – will start shifting over to the new console, leaving the old console behind. How quickly this happens will depend on a number of factors, but developers had all but abandoned the 3DS within a year of the Switch’s launch, and we’d expect larger developers to immediately make the jump with games that couldn’t otherwise run on Switch.

On the other side of things, there are thousands of games on the Switch already, and they’re not going anywhere. Sure, some of those are low-effort asset flips, but at least a thousand, if not much more, are well worth playing. Games could continue to come out on the Switch for quite some time, too. Developers may not want to abandon a player base of almost 150 million people, so even if not every game comes to the Switch after the launch of its successor, there’ll no doubt be a bunch of them.

We also don’t know that the Switch 2 will have backwards compatibility. We assume it probably will, it’s the industry standard and Nintendo has been pretty good about it in the past, especially on its handhelds, but there’s no guarantees at all. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility that the Switch 2 won’t be able to play all, or any, of the Switch’s games, and if that’s the case, buying a Switch is absolutely essential, to play those aforementioned incredible games.

So should you buy a Nintendo Switch in 2024? Our advice is to hold off for now, with the caveat that if you see a really good discount on the console, it could be worth grabbing one and checking it out while we wait for news about a successor. If you’re okay with only playing handheld in the meantime, you could even save even more by picking up a Switch Lite, which is a great little piece of kit.

Related: Nintendo Reportedly Showed Off The Switch 2 At Gamescom