Switch

reports:-switch-successor-is-now-set-for-early-2025

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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Convicted console hacker says he paid Nintendo $25 a month from prison

gaming, hacking, Nintendo, Switch, team xecuter, XS OS / /

Crime doesn’t pay —

As Gary Bowser rebuilds his life, fellow Team Xecuter indictees have yet to face trial.

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It's-a me, the long arm of the law.

Enlarge / It’s-a me, the long arm of the law.

Aurich Lawson / Nintendo / Getty Images

When 54-year-old Gary Bowser pleaded guilty to his role in helping Team Xecuter with their piracy-enabling line of console accessories, he realized he would likely never pay back the $14.5 million he owed Nintendo in civil and criminal penalties. In a new interview with The Guardian, though, Bowser says he began making $25 monthly payments toward those massive fines even while serving a related prison sentence.

Last year, Bowser was released after serving 14 months of that 40-month sentence (in addition to 16 months of pre-trial detention), which was spread across several different prisons. During part of that stay, Bowser tells The Guardian, he was paid $1 an hour for four-hour shifts counseling other prisoners on suicide watch.

From that money, Bowser says he “was paying Nintendo $25 a month” while behind bars. That lines up roughly with a discussion Bowser had with the Nick Moses podcast last year, where he said he had already paid $175 to Nintendo during his detention.

According to The Guardian, Nintendo will likely continue to take 20 to 30 percent of Bowser’s gross income (after paying for “necessities such as rent”) for the rest of his life.

The fall guy?

While people associated with piracy often face fines rather than prison, Nintendo lawyers were upfront that they pushed for jail time for Bowser to “send a message that there are consequences for participating in a sustained effort to undermine the video game industry.” That seems to have been effective, at least as far as Bowser’s concerned; he told The Guardian that “The sentence was like a message to other people that [are] still out there, that if they get caught … [they’ll] serve hard time.”

Bowser appears on the Nick Moses Gaming Podcast from a holding center in Washington state in 2023.

Enlarge / Bowser appears on the Nick Moses Gaming Podcast from a holding center in Washington state in 2023.

Nick Moses 05 Gaming Podcast/YouTube

But Bowser also maintains that he wasn’t directly involved with the coding or manufacture of Team Xecuter’s products, and only worked on incidental details like product testing, promotion, and website coding. Speaking to Ars in 2020, Aurora, a writer for hacking news site Wololo, described Bowser as “kind of a PR guy” for Team Xecuter. Despite this, Bowser said taking a plea deal on just two charges saved him the time and money of fighting all 14 charges made against him in court.

Bowser was arrested in the Dominican Republic in 2020. Fellow Team Xecuter member and French national Max “MAXiMiLiEN” Louarn, who was indicted and detained in Tanzania at the same time as Bowser’s arrest, was still living in France as of mid-2022 and has yet to be extradited to the US. Chinese national and fellow indictee Yuanning Chen remains at large.

“If Mr. Louarn comes in front of me for sentencing, he may very well be doing double-digit years in prison for his role and his involvement, and the same with the other individual [Chen],” US District Judge Robert Lasnik said during Bowser’s sentencing.

Returning to society

During his stay in prison, Bowser tells The Guardian that he suffered a two-week bout of COVID that was serious enough that “a priest would come over once a day to read him a prayer.” A bout of elephantiasis also left him unable to wear a shoe on his left foot and required the use of a wheelchair, he said.

Now that he’s free, Bowser says he has been relying on friends and a GoFundMe page to pay for rent and necessities as he looks for a job. That search could be somewhat hampered by his criminal record and by terms of the plea deal that prevent him from working with any modern gaming hardware.

Despite this, Bowser told The Guardian that his current circumstances are still preferable to a period of homelessness he experienced during his 20s. And while console hacking might be out for Bowser, he is reportedly still “tinkering away with old-school Texas Instruments calculators” to pass the time.

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analyst:-switch-2-will-have-a-massive-8-inch-lcd-screen

Analyst: Switch 2 will have a massive 8-inch LCD screen

gaming, Nintendo, screen size, Switch / /

Bigger is better? —

Larger screen size could lead to a larger device footprint than the current Switch.

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The 7

Enlarge / The 7″ screen of the Switch OLED (top) seen next to the 6.2″ screen of the original Switch.

Sam Machkovech

Nintendo’s follow-up to the aging Switch—which is widely rumored to be aiming for release later this year—will sport an 8-inch LCD screen. That’s according to Omdia analyst Hiroshi Hayase, who is cited in a Bloomberg News report focused on the upcoming handheld’s potential effects on the market for “amusement displays” over the next few years.

An 8-inch screen (measured diagonally) would put the Switch 2 near the extreme upper end of portable gaming screens historically. Among mass-market devices, only the recently launched PlayStation Portal (8-inch screen) and Lenovo Legion Go (8.8-inch screen) have broken past the 7-inch barrier for dedicated gaming handhelds.

That said, the 6.2-inch screen on the original Nintendo Switch also set portable gaming records when it launched in 2017, easily surpassing the once-luxurious 5-inch screen of 2011’s PlayStation Vita. The 2021 launch of the Switch OLED increased the diagonal screen measurement to 7 inches, a screen size that has since become somewhat standard on subsequent portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally.

The Switch OLED achieved its screen size increase over the original model primarily by reducing the thickness of the black bezel surrounding the screen itself. An 8-inch screen on a Switch 2, on the other hand, would likely require the console’s physical footprint to increase. At a standard HD aspect ratio, an 8-inch (diagonal) screen would measure 7 inches (horizontal) by 3.9 inches (vertical), or a bit wider than a standard Switch without Joy-Con’s attached (about 6.8 inches wide).

The 6.2-inch screen of the Switch seen alongside the 5.5-inch screen of the Switch Lite.

Enlarge / The 6.2-inch screen of the Switch seen alongside the 5.5-inch screen of the Switch Lite.

A potential return to an LCD screen for the base-model Switch 2 might also be disappointing for players who have gotten used to the brighter colors and deeper contrast of the Switch OLED (or the recently launched Steam Deck OLED). But OLED screens cost 20 to 25 percent more to produce than similarly sized LCD screens in the smartphone market on average, according to analyst reports. And since the Game Boy’s 1989 launch with a low-resolution black-and-white screen, Nintendo has often eschewed support for the best display technology available in favor of lowering hardware costs (and consumer prices).

In November, Digital Foundry engaged in some informed speculation on the potential hardware power of an upgraded Nvidia chip that it thinks is the “best candidate” for use in a Switch follow-up. Reports from over the summer suggest developers have been shown demos of the upcoming hardware supporting modern graphical effects like ray tracing and DLSS.

Other reports from later in the summer suggest the new console will still include some sort of cartridge slot for physical media. Thus far, though, Nintendo has offered only vague answers to whether the next Switch will be backward-compatible with games designed for the current model.

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