Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa announced in early May that there will soon be talk of the post-Switch era. Within a year, the company will discuss the console that will succeed its best-seller. Its name is not yet known, but it could be the Switch 2.
It does not yet have a name, we do not know what it looks like, but it now exists in Nintendo's official discourse. In a message published on X (formerly Twitter) on May 7, 2024, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa finally mentioned the post-Switch. Above all, he delivered a timetable which provides clarity on the next steps.
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“ We will make an announcement regarding the successor to the Nintendo Switch during this fiscal year “, he said in his tweet. The current fiscal year will end at the end of March 2025. In fact, this will also end the Switch cycle, which began in March 2015, when it was announced almost ten years ago (it went on sale on of March 2017).
The boss of the Japanese video game entertainment giant also wanted to temper expectations for the next Nintendo Direct, scheduled for June 2024. This online presentation will in no way address the successor to the Switch. We will only be talking about the Switch catalog for the second half of 2024.
Will the successor to the Switch be the Switch 2?
The Switch has become Nintendo's best-selling console over the past decade, with almost 140 million units sold worldwide since the start. Two revisions of the machine took place during this period: there was the Switch Lite in September 2019, solely dedicated to portable gaming, and the Switch OLED, with an OLED screen, in October 2021.
The phenomenal popularity of this console suggests that Nintendo could well extend this success story by launching into a “Switch 2”: this would use the same concepts, but with a much more muscular hardware architecture. Historically, Nintendo consoles have always been a little less technically equipped than those from Microsoft and Sony.
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Many rumors surround this Switch 2, but Nintendo is careful not to comment on them. The company still focuses on the Switch, although its sales are inexorably declining. Several release dates have also been brought forward, such as September 2024 or 2025. The calendar given by the Nintendo boss suggests that there will be nothing before 2025, or 2026.