Tuesday, May 9th 2023
Nintendo President: No New Switch Until at Least Spring 2024
Earlier today Nintendo released its financial/earning reports for the fiscal year ending March 2023, and company president Shuntaro Furukawa has briefed investors about sales forecasts, according to a report published by Bloomberg. Furukawa-san predicts that the Switch gaming console will only sell 15 million units over the next fiscal year - sales have been slowing down for a while according to Nintendo's figures, with almost 18 million units purchased throughout 2022-23. The numbers are still very impressive when you consider that Nintendo's flagship gaming platform has been on the market for just over six years - across that span of time, total unit sales have hit the 125.62 million mark.
Furukawa also informed shareholders about the prospect of a Switch console successor arriving within the next fiscal period - Bloomberg's article brings the bad news at this point - it seems that Nintendo is not anticipating a new hardware launch within that time frame. Nintendo's software release schedule - especially in regards to first party titles - looks very threadbare for the rest of the year. The much anticipated Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Friday (May 12) followed by Pikmin 4 in July, but things look to be quiet after that - unless Nintendo has a few surprises lined up for June's preview event season. Rumors of a next generation Switch have been doing the rounds since 2020, back then a "Pro" model was often touted - fans later found out that Nintendo had simply refreshed the system with an OLED panel, some tweaks to chipset efficiency, and updated the docking system to modern output standards - this premium model hit the market in late 2021.
Discussions of a proper Switch "2" have pointed to leaked information about Nintendo possibly partnering up with NVIDIA again - the current model runs on a customized version of Team Green's Tegra X1 SoC. Tipsters reckon that the successor is going to be based on an Orin-series chipset, granting use of an Ampere architecture GPU - thus enabling DLSS on a hybrid home/handheld console. A chipset codenamed "Drake" (with a model code of T239) has emerged from various leaks, but a few folks think that Nintendo and NVIDIA have dropped Tegra in favor of something more cutting-edge.
Sources:
Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware
Furukawa also informed shareholders about the prospect of a Switch console successor arriving within the next fiscal period - Bloomberg's article brings the bad news at this point - it seems that Nintendo is not anticipating a new hardware launch within that time frame. Nintendo's software release schedule - especially in regards to first party titles - looks very threadbare for the rest of the year. The much anticipated Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Friday (May 12) followed by Pikmin 4 in July, but things look to be quiet after that - unless Nintendo has a few surprises lined up for June's preview event season. Rumors of a next generation Switch have been doing the rounds since 2020, back then a "Pro" model was often touted - fans later found out that Nintendo had simply refreshed the system with an OLED panel, some tweaks to chipset efficiency, and updated the docking system to modern output standards - this premium model hit the market in late 2021.
21 Comments on Nintendo President: No New Switch Until at Least Spring 2024
Nvidia SoCs are good as long as Nintendo is not having too much problems with Huang’s terrible business demands. But there are a lot other ARM SoCs, x86 SoCs and even RISC-V is a possibility.
That said, I really hope they do. Playing Pokémon curled up in bed is fantastic.
Anutha day, anutha over-hyped, under-whelming refresh of a mega-meh product that will offer yet anutha round of miniscule improvements, all geared towards sucking anutha round of $$ out of your wallets/CC's....
Gee, I'm sooooo impressed......
n.O.t..
Nintendo needs to stomp into VR. Nintendo Switch VR Pro. I can VR, play on the TV, or play it on the road on the screen or in the goggles. Never happen tho.
The PS3 was a monster to emulate and there's a rather functional emulator out there that has pretty high compatibility. And truth be told, the difficulty to emulate that system came paired with the difficulty to write software for it. So you don't want overly-complicated hardware making your partners' work even harder than it already is.
Undoubtedly Nintendo has multiple prototypes of their next-generation device sitting in their labs right now. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom both run on these prototypes (which have probably been booting for a couple of years).
Nintendo will sell TotK for a year before announcing their next generation hardware which will run all Switch titles.
Who knows what the new device would do? However if it is another hybrid handheld-docked device, maybe 1440p in handheld mode and 2160p in docked mode. This would be 2x linear scaling for Switch titles which would make backwards compatibility pretty easy.