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).