Does the Nintendo Switch Officially Have the Strongest Game Library of All-Time?
By Moe Revel
The Nintendo Direct that took place on June 18th, 2024, was overflowing with stellar game announcements and updates. A new Mario & Luigi game (Mario & Luigi: Brotherhood), a new Mario Party game (Super Mario Party Jamboree), and an update on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. The most shocking announcement to me, however, was the reveal of a new 2D Zelda game (The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) that will follow an adventure through Zelda’s perspective instead of the Link-centered games that we have been accustomed to.
Plenty of news outlets have already posted comprehensive lists of everything that was announced so I will not rehash all of it in this article. If you are interested in reading about all the games that were announced, you can check out IGN’s deep-dive HERE. For this article, however, I want to focus on the implications of how strong this Nintendo Direct was.
Looking at the entirety of the Switch’s library, I find myself beginning to think that this may be the strongest lineup of games for a single console that I have ever seen. Think about your favorite Nintendo intellectual properties; Animal Crossing, Mario, Kirby, Pikmin, Fire Emblem, Pokèmon, Splatoon. All of these franchises and more have had games released on the Switch during its life.
Brand new series have made their way onto the console as well, namely games such as Arms and Astral Chain. According to the website MobyGames, there are currently over eleven thousand games that have been released for the Switch. That number is massive by itself, but it is not even the most baffling thing about the console’s library, that award goes to the fact that there are even more games slated to be released before the next console arrives.
For the sake of simplicity, let us stick with that figure of eleven thousand games. Compared to the PlayStation 2 which has just under three-thousand five-hundred games (MobyGames), that means that for every PlayStation 2 game, there are three games for the Nintendo Switch. For the two best-selling video game consoles of all time, the disparity in the number of game releases is hard to ignore. All of this begs a simple yet hard-to-answer question: does the Switch officially have the best game library of any console?
If you were to ask me that question two years ago I would have said no and argued for the Xbox 360 instead. I spent years adoring the Xbox 360’s library, and still do. Gears of War 3, Halo: Reach, and Fable III are some of my favorite games that I have ever played, and those barely scratch the surface of what that console had to offer.
The sheer quantity and, more importantly, quality of games on the Switch has changed my opinion. Not even the nostalgia that I hold for the GameCube’s library can compare to the endless joy that the Switch has brought into my life and the lives of the other hundred million players on the platform. If you consider yourself a gamer or are remotely interested in them, then there are surely at least a handful of games waiting for you on the Nintendo Switch, with even more coming this year and next year.
What game console do you think has the best library of games? Has this most recent generation of consoles changed your mind? Let me know, and as always, game on friends!