Nintendo was suspiciously absent throughout the entirety of Summer Game Fest, but this week, we’ll finally learn more about the company’s plans for the rest of 2024. The next Nintendo Direct will stream on June 18 at 7:00 AM PT / 10:00 AM ET, and Nintendo says it will feature about 40 minutes of details on Switch games coming in the second half of the year.
Nintendo also reminded us that there won’t be any news about the Nintendo Switch successor during the presentation. We already knew that Nintendo wasn’t ready to talk about the Switch 2 yet, but the company wants to make sure to temper expectations.
Here’s what Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said about the Switch 2 in May:
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 this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.
At this point, it seems more likely that we’ll be waiting until the holiday season or possibly even early 2025 to see an official hardware announcement from Nintendo.
What to expect from the June Nintendo Direct
With that out of the way, what do we expect to see at the Nintendo Direct on Tuesday?
The release schedule on Nintendo’s website is rather barren at the moment, featuring just four upcoming Switch games. They are Zero to Dance Hero and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD for June, and Fitness Boxing feat. Hatsune Miku and Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition coming in July. That’s about as light a schedule as I’ve ever seen on the site.
With the Switch 2 right around the corner, we won’t expect any new entries in major franchises, so don’t hold out hope for a new 3D Mario, Zelda, or Mario Kart. It’s also fairly likely that Metroid Prime 4 is now a Switch 2 game, so that’d be a surprise as well.
There have been rumors that Nintendo has had remakes of the GameCube-era Zelda titles Wind Waker and Twilight Princess in the can for quite a while. If there aren’t going to be many (or any) new first-party games for the rest of the Switch’s life cycle, Nintendo might as well give us some classics that could also be backward compatible with Switch 2.