switch 2

nintendo-pre-announces-a-switch-2-announcement-is-coming…-eventually

Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually

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We’ll tell you later —

More info promised sometime before the end of March 2025.

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Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Enlarge / Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Aurich Lawson

While the past few months have included plenty of informed speculation about the so-called Switch 2, Nintendo hasn’t given even a bare hint that the system is in the works. That changed at least somewhat last night, as Nintendo President Shinto Furukawa shared on social media that “we will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” which ends on March 31, 2025.

In his pre-announcement announcement, Furukawa warned that an upcoming Nintendo Direct presentation planned for June would include “no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor,” suggesting more information may be coming closer to the end of the fiscal year than the beginning.

Furukawa notes that the eventual announcement will come over nine years after Nintendo first alluded to the Switch’s existence with the March 2015 announcement of a console then called “Project NX.” Nintendo didn’t show that hardware publicly until 19 months later, with a three-minute preview trailer that dropped in October 2016. Hands-on press previews for the Switch came three months after that, and we then had to wait almost two more months for the console to finally hit store shelves in March of 2017.

We probably won’t have to wait two years between the formal announcement and retail launch of the Switch 2, though; multiple reports have suggested that Nintendo is aiming for an early 2025 release for the updated hardware. The nearly eight-year gap between the launch of the Switch and its successors would mark a historically long wait for Nintendo home console hardware, which tends to see a refresh every five to six years. But Nintendo did wait nine years before following the original (and best-selling) Game Boy with the Game Boy Color.

Reports have suggested that select third-party developers have had access to the Switch 2 since the middle of last year and that Nintendo is holding off on the release to prepare a stronger launch lineup of first-party software. On that score, we’d like to point out that it has now been nearly seven years since the original announcement of Metroid Prime 4 (and over five years since Nintendo restarted development with a new studio).

The Switch 2 pre-announcement comes alongside the release of Nintendo’s latest financial results, in which Nintendo said it sold 15.7 million Nintendo Switch units in the 12-month period ending in March. That’s down quite a bit from the system’s peak sales in the 2020–2021 fiscal year, but it’s still a substantial sales performance for an aging system that has now passed 141 million total units sold since 2017. The overall numbers are closing in on the record currently held by the PS2 (155 million sales) and the Nintendo DS (154 million).

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Switch 2 reportedly replaces slide-in Joy-Cons with magnetic attachment

backward compatible, compatibility, controller, gaming, Joy-Cons, Nintendo, switch 2 / /

Switch-ing magnets, how do they work? —

Design choice may have implications for current Joy-Con compatibility.

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The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2

Enlarge / The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2

The iconic slide-in “click” of the Switch Joy-Cons may be replaced with a magnetic attachment mechanism in the Switch 2, according to a report from Spanish-language gaming news site Vandal.

The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons “difficult.” Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system’s magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.

Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit’s dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be “larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck.”

In 2021, Vandal accurately reported some early details of the Switch OLED design shortly before the upgraded console’s launch, lending some credence to new Switch 2 reports from the same outlet.

Pick a controller and stick with it

Nintendo has a spotty history with forward-compatibility of controllers on its recent consoles. The company went out of its way to ensure that GameCube controllers worked on the Wii (and the Wii U, to a limited extent), while the Wii U was largely built around compatibility with existing Wii Remotes and control accessories. For the Switch, on the other hand, Nintendo has released a number of limited-edition retro-styled controllers specifically for use with classic Nintendo Switch Online games.

Microsoft has made a point of highlighting that the Xbox Series S/X works with all standard Xbox One controllers (not you, Kinect). PS4 owners, meanwhile, had to purchase new DualSense controllers to use on the PS5.

Regarding software, Nintendo has offered only vague answers on whether the upcoming Switch 2 will be compatible with the thousands of games designed for the current Switch generation. However, some reports suggest that developers are already testing this kind of backward compatibility on Nintendo’s upcoming hardware.

In February, numerous reports suggested that Nintendo was targeting an early 2025 launch for the Switch 2 to give developers more time to create a strong software launch for the unannounced console. Earlier reports suggested the new hybrid console will sport a larger 8-inch screen and could support DLSS upscaling on Ampere-based Nvidia processors.

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Reports: Switch successor is now set for early 2025

gaming, Nintendo, Switch, switch 2 / /

Waiting is the hardest part —

Nintendo’s publishing partners were reportedly told of new plans last week.

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I took this photo nearly seven years ago, and I'm still waiting for a new game console from Nintendo.

Enlarge / I took this photo nearly seven years ago, and I’m still waiting for a new game console from Nintendo.

Throughout 2023, we saw multiple credible reports that Nintendo was planning to release its long-awaited Switch follow-up sometime in 2024. Now, a new flurry of new reports say third-party developers have recently been advised that Nintendo’s next console is aiming for an early 2025 release.

Brazilian journalist Pedro Henrique Lutti Lippe was among the first to report on the new planned release window on Friday, and Video Games Chronicle expanded on that report the same day. The outlet cited its own sources in reporting that “third-party game companies were recently briefed on an internal delay in Nintendo’s next-gen launch timing, from late 2024 to early the following year.”

By late Friday, those reports had been corroborated by Eurogamer, which said the launch would slip past the 2024 calendar year “but still [be] within the coming financial year” (ending in March 2025). Over the weekend, Bloomberg cited unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter” in reporting that some publishers have been told “not to expect the console until March 2025 at the earliest.”

A quiet 2024?

One unnamed publishing source told Video Games Chronicle that the push for a 2025 hardware launch was “so that Nintendo could prepare stronger first-party software for the [upcoming] console.” That could be bad news for this year’s crop of upcoming Switch software, as Nintendo and other developers might adapt current Switch projects for the upcoming hardware instead. Thus far, Nintendo has only announced three first-party Switch titles that it plans to release this year, a list that includes two HD remakes of games from earlier console generations (though additional game announcements could come at any point).

“Nintendo is likely looking at a pretty dry pipeline this year,” Japanese industry analyst Serkan Toto told Bloomberg. “The company will still try to keep the blockbusters for the next console, so 2024 might see more remakes of old Nintendo hits. In any case, 2024 will be a lot tougher for Nintendo without a new device.”

Yet Nintendo still seems bullish about the current Switch, which was approaching 140 million cumulative sales through the end of 2023 despite never dropping its initial $300 asking price. Earlier this month, Nintendo raised its official expectations for hardware sales in the current fiscal year (which ends next month) from 15 to 15.5 million units.

An early 2025 launch for Nintendo’s next console would mark roughly eight years since the Switch’s March 2017 launch. That would be a historically long gap between home consoles for Nintendo, which has launched a new TV-based console every five or six years since the NES first hit North America in the mid-’80s. The Switch hit the market just four and a half years after the ill-fated Wii U, which failed to capture even a fraction of the Wii’s success.

An eight-year gap between consoles wouldn’t be unprecedented in the history of Nintendo portable hardware, though. Nintendo waited over nine years after the Game Boy’s 1989 release before unleashing the Game Boy Color on the market.

Shares in Nintendo on the Japanese stock market dropped nearly 6 percent in Monday trading after rising to their highest price point since the summer of 2021. Nintendo has not publicly commented on any plans for new gaming hardware, though the company has offered vague hints regarding its plans for backward compatibility going forward.

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