Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Xbox Game Pass is the best deal in gaming. While that sentiment has certainly been reexamined many times over the past few years with Game Pass’s price hikes and the new tiered system that limits day one first-party Xbox games to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, it’s still a decent deal, even if it’s a substantially worse deal than it was just a few years ago.
There’s always been talk about bringing Game Pass to other platforms, but according to Phil Spencer, Nintendo and PlayStation haven’t been interested… yet.
Despite Nintendo’s previous disinterest, the power behind the Switch 2 means that now is the perfect time for Game Pass to finally come to the platform. I’m not holding my breath, but I am holding onto hope.
Nintendo Finally Has The Hardware
It’s easy to see the appeal of having Game Pass on the Switch 2. With how portable the Switch is and how many options Game Pass gives its subscribers, the idea of downloading a handful of some of Game Pass’s best titles like Fallout: New Vegas, Hi-Fi Rush, or Avowed before starting a long plane flight or a week’s vacation sounds like a dream come true.
As good as the pitch is, though, there’s always been a caveat to the dream, considering how underpowered the original Switch is. It’s hard to imagine a lot of the current Game Pass roster running on the console without having to find some sort of workaround like launching Game Pass exclusively as a Cloud Streaming service by making use of the preexisting xCloud services.
That’s all changed now that the Switch 2 has been revealed and we’ve heard developers say how impressed they are with what it can handle. The Switch 2’s specs have been compared to the Xbox Series S, which is a huge step up from where the original Switch was. I mean, the console can run Cyberpunk 2077, something that the Xbox One and PS4 struggled to do at launch. Based purely on the hardware, it seems like Game Pass on the Switch is finally possible, but that doesn’t exactly mean it’s likely.
What Game Pass On The Switch 2 Could Look Like
Even though Nintendo now has the hardware to make Game Pass work on its platform, that’s only half the battle. Many titles that are a part of Game Pass’s library don’t have native Switch ports, which means that if Game Pass launched on the Switch 2, they wouldn’t just magically be available to be played without some serious additional development time unless they were added as cloud games.
That said, when bringing a subscription service to a completely new platform like the Switch, it would most likely try to make use of the vast existing Switch-exclusive library. Given Nintendo’s comments about how it doesn’t like giving away their hard work for anything less than full price, it seems unlikely that Mario and Zelda would appear on Game Pass’s potential Switch 2 edition, but it’s easy to imagine other console exclusives to launch on the service like Hades 2, The Duskbloods, and Survival Kids.
Additionally, just because the first-party Xbox lineup and other triple-A titles might not be able to make the jump to the Switch 2, a good portion of Game Pass’s indie offerings are already on the Switch, so Game Pass would potentially have a solid library of indies ready to go.
Even though I want to be hopeful, I’m not entirely sure Game Pass will ever come to the Switch, because it doesn’t really seem like Nintendo’s thing. Either way, I think we can all agree that what we really want is Game Pass to come to Light Bright. I’d love to see the Starfield port for that.
- Brand
-
Nintendo
- Operating System
-
Proprietary
- Storage
-
256GB internal / MicroSD
- Resolution
-
1080p (handheld) / 4K (docked)