Back in May 2024, Nintendo made an official announcement both to their investors and also via social media, that they will be announcing the successor to the Nintendo Switch console before the end of their fiscal year. It’s important to note that a fiscal year and a calendar year are not one and the same. A fiscal year will vary from business to business, which for Nintendo runs from 1st April to 31st March. So, the current fiscal year Nintendo are operating in will run until 31st March 2025 which is the absolute latest an announcement can be made barring any delays.
This statement has once again been made during the latest quarterly investors meeting last week, so we know it is still on track to be revealed by the end of March 2025. The question is, what is the Switch successor and when will it be revealed?
Firstly, in all likelihood, the Switch successor will carry the Switch branding. As of time of writing, the Nintendo Switch has sold an impressive 146 million consoles making it the third best selling system only behind the Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2. Time will tell as to whether the Switch will outsell either those two consoles.
Unlike the Wii, which despite the high initial success, struggled to keep much interest in the long term as many nearly bought it for the bundled Wii Sports and potentially bought Mario Kart Wii as well. The brand had little lasting impact and was in part the reasons behind the abysmal failure of the Wii U, though marketing was also pretty dire. The Switch branding however is very different. From the beginning, Nintendo came out with a strong distinctive approach to marketing the console. The marketing is pretty top notch, the nostalgia of going back to a red and white branding with a name that not only tells you what the system is, but is short and easy to remember also helps a lot.
Whereas the Wii struggled to break much past the 100 million mark before falling off a cliff, and sales both third and more importantly for Nintendo, first party outside a select few weren’t the greatest, the Switch has remained a massive seller year on year. Then you have first party games that, are often selling far and away more than either Sony or Microsoft has achieved. In fact, there are a number of third party games that despite having a multi system launch struggles to hit the numbers Nintendo has seen. This means that for Nintendo, people who buy into the Switch aren’t just getting it for a bundled game and Mario Kart. They are buying a lot of what is on offer.
We have also seen for the first time in a while, a fairly strong showing from third party developers and publishers. It doesn’t have Call of Duty or most of what EA and Ubisoft has to offer, but it has had a better reputation than previous consoles from Nintendo. This is in part due to the ease of developing for the console and the fact it had enough juice under the hood to pull off the “impossible ports”. Not as powerful as a PlayStation 4 sure, but a bit more powerful than the PlayStation 3 generation but with more modern tools available to developers and more modern engines such as Unreal Engine 4 has a lot to do with all of this.
For the purposes of this piece, we will call the Switch successor the Switch 2 going forward.
The Switch 2 we now know thanks to Nintendo officially confirming it last week, will be backwards compatible with the current Switch. While Nintendo never mentioned whether it would include physical games as well as digital, it’s pretty much a given considering how popular the physical games presence remains for Nintendo’s sales. Also, it’s rare that a console supporting backward compatibility would remove something like physical games from being playable.
We also do not know as of yet whether the backwards compatibility will have any effect on the games such as a boost to frame rates when unlocked etc. The likelihood is that we will see patches for some games, either free or paid, that allows the games to make use of the new hardware.
In terms of the actual hardware itself, it’s been heavily speculated that the Switch 2 will be using the Nvidia T239 which is expected to have the power somewhere between the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 4 Pro but with 12 GB RAM and potentially support for ray tracing and upscaling capabilities. This is where it can become complicated to get into, and most people won’t understand what most the details means. But if Nintendo chose to allow for ray tracing and DLSS upscaling, without severely underclocking the hardware, we could see something very much capable of a lot more than the previous generations could handle.
While there is a hella lot of great games on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One that could easily get ported to the Switch 2, thanks to the way the current generation is shaping out, it is not too far fetched that current generation games don’t get the port down as we saw with the current Switch. In fact it could be much easier to do as hardware wise, the Switch 2 could handle much more demanding games than if it were a big standard PlayStation 4 chipset.
Another point to make is that Nintendo recently bought port specialists Shiver Entertainment. It’s likely this is Nintendo aiming to keep convincing third party publishers and developers to bring their games over to the Switch 2, without the costs of doing it in house or outsourcing.
As for when a Switch 2 could be announced, that is difficult to answer. It was rumoured to have been in late September as Nintendo seemingly pulled their end of year Direct forward to the same day as the indie Direct at the end of August instead of early September. The thinking was that Nintendo had something big planned. As it turns out, nothing was planned and now we have entered the holiday season, we know it won’t be revealed this year. Or, almost certainly know it won’t. That leaves just three months next year.
January seems to soon after the holidays and is the month of Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. February is currently empty but March now has Xenoblade Chronicles X. February seems like a great choice to make an announcement for the Switch 2 but then again, the end of March would allow for high share prices and investors confidence right before the end of year meeting. So it’s a bit of a coin toss for the month of reveal.
There is no way of determining when the Switch 2 launches. It could be as little of 3 months after reveal with a massive marketing blitz or could be the more standard 6 months. It is speculated that mass production has already begun, which would potentially mean Nintendo are aiming to have a decent stockpile at launch as have stated was their goal. It also means that there could be a leak from the factory floor which Nintendo would you imagine want to avoid. That could play into when a reveal happens, though again even it a leak did now happen, we are in holiday season so any such Switch 2 reveal could cause serious problems shifting Switch consoles which are already selling fewer than initially expected.
