It's only taken five months, but Nintendo just very quietly launched a new web page that definitely should have been ready when the Switch 2 launched in June. At the time, and just before the console became available, there was a little vagueness about exactly which Switch games would work on the new hardware.
Nintendo said that the vast majority would be supported, and that some would actually get performance benefits, but it was quite challenging to work out which games might not work as expected.
Once the console was in players' hands, though, dedicated testers started to make a bit of a catalogue of which games had issues and which didn't run at all, but that hasn't always been easy for regular folks to find and browse.
Now, Nintendo has finally made its own proper, searchable system. It's snappily named, as ever with Nintendo: the Nintendo Switch 2 Compatibility Information site. You can access it right here, and it gives you a search bar that you can use to find whatever game you're curious about.
When you click on your chosen result, you'll get a quick summary of whether it'll work as expected or whether it has some problems. For Fire Emblem: Engage, for example, I got a result with a tick icon and the message: "Supported – Game behavior is consistent with Nintendo Switch."
For more troubled games, you get different results. Nier: Automata, which is probably the best-known game with issues, gets me the orange exclamation mark above, and the message: "Unsupported – Problems with game progression have been found."
Of course, you don't actually get much more detail than that, but this is still a helpful little tool for those with big Switch 1 game libraries trying to figure out if they want to upgrade to Nintendo's newer console. Or, more pertinently, whether they might need to keep hold of their original Switch once they have a Switch 2, to avoid being left with games that they can't play despite the newer hardware's backward compatibility efforts.
