In late June, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa answered a question about the successor to the Switch. It wasn’t an especially profound question, but the fact that he answered it at all led me to believe that an announcement wouldn’t be far behind. We’re likely still a few months away from an official reveal, but on Monday, Video Games Chronicle reported that Nintendo plans to launch its next-gen console in the second half of 2024.
According to the report, sources with knowledge of Nintendo’s plans claim that the company has already sent development kits to major partner studios. The console might be ready to ship early next year, but Nintendo wants to make sure that it has plenty of stock on hand at launch to avoid the supply issues that the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S faced.
While specific details about the console have been hard to come by, the sources say the Switch 2 will be playable in portable mode, like the Switch. The new console will reportedly launch with an LCD screen in order to keep costs down, as the internal storage will likely need to increase. Even the $349.99 Switch OLED model ships with just 64GB of storage.
Nintendo’s next-gen console should still accept physical games via a cartridge slot as well, but it’s unclear if the game carts will look the same. The sources also don’t know if the Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch, but Furukawa did say Nintendo “would like to make sure that customers can smoothly transition while still utilising their Nintendo Accounts.”
VGC asked Tokyo-based industry consultant Dr. Serkan Toto about a potential 2024 launch for the next Nintendo home console, and he seems to believe it’s plausible:
I would generally say that looking at Nintendo’s financials, it seems clear that it’s time for a new piece of hardware in 2024. Hardware is already projected to fall 16.5% year-on-year in the current fiscal, while the minus for software is expected to hit 15.9%. The only way to stop these losses from totally ballooning next fiscal is a new device, and the second half of 2024 sounds like a realistic release window to me.
VGC also published a video discussing their report about Nintendo’s next-gen console:
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