It’s alive, it’s ALIVE! Nintendo just casually ‘announced’ the “successor to the Nintendo Switch” on a random Tuesday morning through an even more random post on X.com. Kinda. The post, apparently coming from Shuntaro Furukawa, the President of Nintendo, confirms that the Japanese conglomerate will unveil the now seven-year-old console’s successor “within the fiscal year.”
Switching up on March
This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct…
— 任天堂株式会社（企業広報・IR） (@NintendoCoLtd) May 7, 2024
For Nintendo, that means before 31 March 2025. We wouldn’t put it past them to hold onto the big news until that date, but we don’t think so. In February, we reported that the Switch 2 Pro Ultra or whatever it’s called, had been delayed internally — with Nintendo warning publishers not to expect the console until “March 2025 at the earliest.”
Looking through the history books, the original was unveiled in October 2016, before finally hitting shelves in March of the following year. That’s a roughly four/five-month gap between the two dates, and we expect to see something similar this time. True, a successor won’t need the same level of marketing, already being a proven product, but still. We’re boldly predicting a 22 November 2024 unveiling.
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That doesn’t mean it’s giving up on the current Switch. In the same announcement, Furukawa mentions that Nintendo will be hosting a Direct “this June”, where we’ll get a peek at the game line-up tasked with keeping the Switch’s heart beating until 2025. Furukawa stresses that “there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.” The Wind Waker, when?
Considering the timeline we’re working with, it seems fitting that Nintendo would drop this pre-announcement right alongside its current fiscal year-end report, along with a forecast of what’s to come. We also got an insight into the company’s best-selling titles of 2023, with Tears of the Kingdom pulling in 20.61 million sales (minus the million or so Nintendo claims that were pirated).