Following this week's Nintendo earnings report, Shigeru Miyamoto addressed whether a potential Nintendo Switch successor might support backwards compatibility.
www.ign.com
That's from November, so Yes and No? For all we know they might dump Nvidia and go with a custom AMD SoC like everyone else.
This is the original source:
"Q5 You previously mentioned that you recognize that the issue in the game console business is that past software cannot be played due to hardware generation changes and that content is initialized. However, now, by utilizing the Nintendo Account and making new hardware backward-compatible, it seems that content can be transferred semi-permanently in the dedicated game console business, just as with video games. I think there are both advantages and disadvantages to making newly released hardware backward compatible with previous hardware."
"A5: Shigeru Miyamoto, Representative Director and Fellow.
We used to offer a system called "Virtual Console," which allowed people to play old software on new hardware. In comparison, video can be enjoyed for a long time as long as there is a playback environment. However, the rights for video are complicated, so Nintendo is proceeding with the project after ensuring that the rights are in place. Indeed, in the past, software development for game consoles was done in a dedicated development environment that differed for each hardware. Therefore, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not be taken over.
Therefore, software released on past hardware could not be played without modification.
Recently, however, the software development environment itself has gradually become more standardized, so it is generally easier to create a playback environment that allows software for past hardware to be played on new hardware than before. However, Nintendo's strength is in creating new games. With new hardware, we would like to propose unique games that cannot be realized on existing hardware."
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2022/221109_2.pdf
He gets asked about BC, and replies saying that emulation is now easier and isn't that console-specific as it was before, meaning it's now easier to reuse it in different hardware (in the context of this question, pretty likely meaning multiple generations), and that now when they get the rights to re-release a game seems that they don't sign them for a single re-release but as something more generic that can be applied to multiple hardware (in the context of this question, pretty likely meaning multiple generations).
Meaning, if the emulation now makes it easy to put games on multiple hardware and they have the rights the games on multiple hardware, they won't need to focus that because the work will be already done. So instead of focusing on rehashing games from previous generations, now will be able to focus on new games. Which is what a dev prefers.
So I think he pretty much confirms that Switch 2 will be BC with Switch normal games and the VC games available on Switch. Earlier in February they also hinted BC:
