 I have a very simple question for all of you but it's one that seems to spur a ton of debate especially after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X slash S launched. Is Switch a generation 8 or generation 9 console? Is it neither? Both. Before I get into it, hey we have a giveaway going on. Head down to the description of the pinned comment to enter. Also if you end up enjoying this video why don't you hit that like button and subscribe for more content. So let's start off by first making a rather simple. No system can be part of multiple generations of hardware but why to switch muddy that water? It's not due to the release date which many might argue but rather because it's technically a handheld system sort of so you may think Nintendo themselves defines it as a home console. So how the heck does the light fit into that? It's a variant not the base. Nintendo to this day will tell you Switch is a home console. They still list it as one on their official website and it's one you can also take with you. It's a hybrid but that's not how Nintendo thinks. Switch absolutely fundamentally gets quote-unquote console games. Well we should clarify that as home console games. Doom Eternal? Check. The Witcher 3? Check. Switch may muddy the water on what a home console is but we can all agree it is fundamentally the next platform to follow up the Wii U. Wii U was a generation 8 platform along with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. So being a successor Switch is simply put a generation 9 system right? You would think it's that simple but then someone on Twitter argued this yesterday. This comes from Tupinator who said the senior Wikipedia editors and administrators have established the switches to be defined as an 8th generation system. Well the Wikipedia gods have spoken. Switch is a generation 8 system case closed. Wikipedia is one of the best sources of information on the internet. As in it's one of the world's single greatest resources for information as it gathers information from all over the world on every topic in existence and it provides that information in a fairly fact-based article format. However despite this universities won't accept nor will real-world publications Wikipedia as a source. Why? Because of exactly what happened in labeling Switch as an 8th generation platform. Everything on Wikipedia requires a source. Until it doesn't. What is the source that defined Nintendo Switch as an 8th generation system to them? Their personal opinion. The funny thing about opinions is that unless it's about your level of enjoyment of something or the usefulness of a certain tool at the end of the day an opinion can be wrong. In fact when it comes to defining what systems belong in which generation opinions really aren't a factor. Despite this I pulled all of you to ask which generation Switch is part of. 9 did come out ahead but not by a lot. Why? What are the reasons it's a generation 9 system? What are the reasons people think it isn't? Well what exactly is a console generation? How do we define it? More powerful systems? A set period of time? Factually the only consistent factor in the starting of a new generation of hardware has been new hardware releasing from a major player in the industry that replaces the old. It hasn't always been based on power and hasn't always been based on the time the prior system was on the market. However let's first look at the arguments made for Switch to be an 8th generation platform and then we will address point by point why those arguments don't apply. Here are the basic arguments for Switch to be an 8th generation system. Switch is not in the same technical realm as a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X slash S. Technically it's not in the same technical realm as a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One but that's not it here and there. Switch is quite literally a Wii U in a new form. Switch just turned 4 years old. 4 years can be a generation into itself. Kind of weird to bring that up but we'll get into that in a moment. It released closer to the release date of the PlayStation 4 than the PlayStation 5. The PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X came out after Switch. Right and wrong technically. The Pro released in 2016, the Xbox One X in 2017 and all Switch did is get a bunch of Wii U games. Very very interesting isn't it? So to address a few points on the Wii U game front I guess PlayStation 4 is a PlayStation 3 is it not? I mean there were 7 games ported and remastered that were exclusive to PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4. I'm not counting any of the third party multi-platform games. These are just the exclusive games. Alright well there's 11 such games on Switch. Only a 4 game difference. Granted Switch also has 70 plus exclusives. PlayStation does too but hey who's counting? I guess PlayStation 4 must be a PlayStation 3 based on that argument. See it's kind of a dumb argument to bring up oh you know they ported a bunch of games and stuff. That happens pretty much in every generation of system even dating back to like the first couple console generations. Not like how many systems has Pong been on? Tetris. Like these games are always ported to other platforms and stuff. So this argument is just dumb. The fact that Wii U games get ported is irrelevant. I think we can all agree there. But let's talk about like release timing which by the way we have a long argument on that. The PlayStation 4 released in November 15, 2013. The Switch released on March 3rd, 2017 and the PlayStation 5 released on November 12, 2020. PlayStation 4 to Switch there's about 1,204 days difference from releases or about 3.3 years. Switch to PlayStation 5 has 1,351 days or 3.7 years. So factually Switch released closer to PlayStation 4 than PlayStation 5. But Wii U is an 8th generation system. That came out actually a year before PlayStation 4. So Switch came out 4.3 years after the start of the 8th generation of consoles. So it's actually closer to the start or what people are claiming is the start of the 9th generation than the 8th. Fun little fact there. So does release timing matter? Well, that's still a lot of time. It's still muddy as the water, right? So first up, let's mention why this even matters. You see in the grand scheme for consumers, what generation Switch is in is irrelevant. Just play what you want to play on what you want to play it on and call it a day. But it matters when you start to consider what the best selling platform of a given generation is. If Switch is an 8th generation platform, Switch is still going to be on sale for another 3-4 years. It is going to pass the sales of PlayStation 4 quite easily sometime during that timetable. That would make Switch the best selling platform of the 8th generation of video game consoles. Except it could be dismissed when many of the sales came during the 9th generation of platforms. What was the best selling system of the 7th generation? We. That's not really even debated. 8th? PlayStation 4. Except Switch is going to pass it in a couple of years. So Switch? But wait, Switch may be out for 3 or even 4 years of the 9th generation platforms. I'm confused. What's going on? What the hell, Nintendo? Why are you confusing the market? They're not. What's confusing the market is really your lack of video game history. What's going on is actually really not so complicated. So let's address the specs. The Switch is more powerful than a Wii U. In fact, it's more than twice as powerful as a Wii U. When you talk about specs, the SNES was considered a 16-bit console. The NES was an 8-bit console. Switch literally made a very similar generational leap in terms of raw power and a massive generational leap in terms of architecture. They were still using power PC from the late 90s in the Wii U. They moved onto the modern PC-like architecture in x86 slash x64 with Switch. But it doesn't measure up to the PlayStation 4, let alone the PlayStation 5. True, and neither did the Wii U. The Wii didn't measure up to the 360 or PlayStation 3 either, just in terms of raw performance. Platforms do NOT need to be similar specs to be part of the same generation. So let's just look at some video game history to understand game generations. The first generation console was the Magnavox Odyssey that released in 1972. The next generation one console was the Atari Home Pong which came out two years later in 1974. The other Gen 1 system that people remember a lot is the Coleco Telstar which released in 1976, or four years after the generation started. Not only people may not realize this, but Nintendo was actually part of that first generation of consoles. That's right, Nintendo was there day one, sort of. They released a Color TV game in Japan in 1977, five years after the generation began. It was a strange time as technically the entire line of Color TV game consoles were part of the first generation with a final one released in 1980. This was the wild wild west of the video game era technically, and the generation didn't end until 1983 despite the second generation of console gaming already going on. What's interesting here of course is that the reason these iterations of the Color TV aren't considered new generations is although these systems didn't have like any way to add games to them, they were all pack-in systems. So releasing new versions of the same Color TV game console was just to release a new console to have more games. Think releasing a NES classic but then either a NES Classic 2, a NES Classic 3, a NES Classic 4 to add more games to the library. That was basically what Nintendo was doing with the Color TV. The second generation launched with the Fairchild Channel F. Yeah, you might not even have heard of that system. It launched in 1976. A huge differentiator at the time was purely from just a how we consumed game perspective. This began the cartridge era, so now these were no longer systems that had games built in. You had to have cartridges, and yeah it also featured a microprocessor, but the cartridges is really what distinguished Gen 2 from Gen 1. Alright, so generation one were all systems that hadn't built in. Generation two had the cartridge era, so the Atari 2600 is widely considered the king of that second generation, and it came out one year later in 1977. So Fairchild Channel F, 76, one year later, the Atari 2600. The Magnavox Odyssey 2, literally the second Odyssey joined a year later in 1978, so two years after the generation began. And television joined the second generation in 1979, three years after the Fairchild. The Kalika Vision released in 1982, and was actually considered the final new system of the second console generation, a full six years after the generation actually began. Crazy. But why are the systems that are released so far apart in years all part of the same generation? Simply put, it's because all of these systems were based around the same technology and very similar concepts. The second generation was still very much a wild wild west that happened and also helped push the actual 1980s video game crash. So there was just so much going on with video game consoles back then that it just consoles the games, everything led to the 1980s crash. However, video game home consoles bounced back during the third generation with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega SG 1000. This generation was unique because it shifted the video game home console market domination to two Japanese companies instead of American based ones. Technically, the most successful systems of the generation were the Sega Master System, NES and Atari 7800 released in 1986. The odd part here is that Sega released three iterations of the Sega SG 1000 series with the third being rebranded as the Master System. As you will come to see, Sega was very unique as a console maker as they would tend to go with release as many versions of a system as possible until they could, you know, find a hit. It was weird. It's kind of like, make as much crap as you can, throw it all and see what sticks. It's basically what Sega's strategy in the console market was for a long time. It led to them actually exiting the console race due to several iterations and failures in consoles before the Dreamcast came out. Alright, so the fourth generation of consoles actually started with the TurboGrapics 16, which released in 1987. That's sort of strange, isn't it? Because the Famicom released in 1983 and that was like the start of the third generation. So this was actually four years later and began what is commonly referred to as the 16 bit era. The second console to come out for that generation for was the Sega Genesis, which launched in 1988. Just a year later, the third system of the fourth generation was the SNES, which came out in 1990, three years after the TurboGrapics 16. Notably around this time, in general, handheld consoles were starting to be considered as part of the generation. But for the purpose of talking Switch, we'll sort of leave out the correlation of handheld gaming systems as they factually aren't considered outsiders of console generations. That's right, console generations aren't specifically about home consoles, they're also about handheld. But we're going to set aside handheld for now for the sake of just making sure this video doesn't go for 50 minutes. Alright, so the fifth generation of consoles kicked off with the 3DO interactive multiplayer and the Atari Jaguar in 1993. The Sega Saturn came next in 1994, with the PlayStation as well. Nintendo joined the fifth generation in 1996 within Nintendo 64, which came three years after the generation began. The sixth generation of consoles began two years after the release of the Nintendo 64. Yeah, well leave it or not, 64 came out and two years later, the Sega Dreamcast launched in 1998. You know, the same year that Ocarina of Time came out. PlayStation 2 joined in 2000, while the Gamecube and Xbox jumped into the sixth generation in 2001, three years after Sega started the generation. The seventh generation is actually fairly unique for a couple of reasons. First up, it marks the first generation of consoles where only three platform manufacturers exist. It's also the first generation where all platforms released within a year of each other. The generation began with the Xbox 360 in 2005, just four years after the release of the original Xbox. The PlayStation 3 and Wii joined the fray the next year. This went on to be one of the greatest generations of gaming in terms of sales. All three platforms crossed 80 million in sales, with Wii crossing 100. It is the longest between generation weights we have ever had, as the first eighth generation system didn't come until 2012. That being the Wii U. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched the next year in 2013. Then the Switch happened. 4.3 full years into the generation, we got the Nintendo Switch. Based on everything we covered, it could easily be the start of Gen 9 or the last new platform for Gen 8. Except one key variable. Switch is the successor to the Wii U. It's twice as powerful. More than twice as powerful. In fact, if you look at the tech sheet, if you look at the spec sheet, it's not a new iteration of the same platform like a PlayStation 4 Pro or an Xbox One X, Nintendo themselves calls it a home console. And in fact, the successor to Wii U. You can't even take a Wii U disk and use it on Switch. Unlike PlayStation 4 Pro that can use normal PlayStation 4 disks in all games across. Compatible. So, successor. Not iteration. Let's think about this then. If Switch started Gen 9 in 2017, then Xbox and PlayStation joined the generation 9 3.7 years later. Is that even feasible? I think if you look back at a console history, the clear answer is absolutely. It's actually, indeed, normal. Outside of generation 7 and 8, there haven't been any consistency in the release date of given generation systems. Beyond that, there is no definition on what length of time a system must be on the market for the next one to be considered next gen. Is 4 years of Wii U not enough? Then why did everyone agree it was enough from Xbox to Xbox 360? Why did some systems exist for only 2 years before a new one came and then that was considered part of the next generation? Because the lines that define generations are extremely flexible and essentially solely determined by the intent of the console released. If the intent is for it to be a replacement for the current that is not an iteration, then it is factually part of a new generation. Ergo, Switch is a 9th generation system as it is Nintendo's own 8th generation console. Nintendo didn't participate in the 2nd generation of consoles, likely due to the market crash at the time. They did kick off the 9th gen 3.7 years before anyone else joined. Sure, the technology gap is large, but that doesn't matter. In fact, while we aren't addressing that here, video game console generations aren't even about home or handheld, tabletop and everything in between as these are all technically part of the generations as well. Factually, not even up for debate. From the Engage to the Sega Nomad to the Virtual Boy and the 3DS, all of these platforms are part of these specific generations as well. But for simplicity's sake, I chose not to dive into that history as that probably requires its own video. That being said, I think it's very clear to see here that the Nintendo Switch is, by all rights, a gen 9 system. I've seen other people out there, other YouTubers, I won't call out anyone specifically, say that arguing that Switch is a 9th gen system just because it's a successor to the Wii U is a child's argument. When really, I think the child argument is to try to dismiss it based on technical specs or release date, as these are not actually determining factors of a generation. It can be determining factors of when a generation started, but it's not the determination of what generation a platform belongs in. If you look at the history of console generations, you'll see there is a wide variant, sometimes up to 6 years of a generation starting and a new platform of that generation launching. Switch coming out 4.3 years into gen 8 or 3.7 years before many people consider gen 9 starting is not abnormal. It's just not. So yeah, Switch is a gen 9 system because Wii U is their 8th generation, it was actually the Nintendo 7th generation, but it was a part of the 8th generation of consoles and Switch is the successor to that, that's more powerful than that, that uses a different form factor and also uses a different game base, it uses cartridges versus discs. It is factually a next gen or in this case current gen Nintendo platform with Wii U being the previous generation, meaning that Nintendo kicked off generation 9, whether you like it or not. So that does mean Playstation 5 and Xbox series are playing catch up to Switch when it comes to sales, but that's neither here nor there, the only people that should truly care about that are the companies themselves who are making hand over the fist money and everyone right now is winning as I feel like we are entering into another heyday, another gen 7 with 3 massively successful platforms and I feel like this is going to be a very very interesting debate coming around again when Nintendo launches their next gen platform which who knows when it's coming, the Switch Pro by the way would not be considered an next gen platform unless Nintendo calls it as such, it would just be another iteration of the current platform, so Switch Pro wouldn't be next generation either, we need to wait and see what Nintendo has in store, in 3-4 years Nintendo likely will release another new platform, the question is at that point what are Playstation 5 and Xbox series looking like and when is Playstation 6 and the next system coming, it doesn't really matter, Nintendo could be potentially and probably highly likely kicking off the 10th generation of consoles as well, but no point in talking about something that hasn't happened yet. Alright folks I am Nathaniel Robojantz from Nintendo 5, you enjoyed this video, let me know down in the comments below, tell me how wrong I am, tell me how right I am, there was a lot of research done on this video, handhelds are factually part of generations, technically 3DS is part of the 8th generation of systems as well, and so even if Switch was a successor to that, it also means Switch is a 9th generation system, but again, a different argument for a different video, I'll catch you guys in the next one.