Nintendo President: No New Switch Until at Least Spring 2024

[T0@st]

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.



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[Daven]

Nintendo no longer competes with MS and Sony and for awhile, they had the handheld gaming only market all to themselves for awhile. Now PC gaming only handhelds are everywhere so Nintendo needs to step up and soon!

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.

 

[Chaitanya]

Nintendo no longer competes with MS and Sony and for awhile, they had the handheld gaming only market all to themselves for awhile. Now PC gaming only handhelds are everywhere so Nintendo needs to step up and soon!

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.

Also their general attitude of treating their customers as 3rd class citizen will come back to bite them royally.

 

[CosmicWanderer]

To me, it doesn't make sense for Nintendo to continue in the handheld space given the rise of PC handhelds.

That said, I really hope they do. Playing Pokémon curled up in bed is fantastic.

 

[JimmyDoogs]

My guess is a release date in the same time frame as the original Switch, which was March 3rd. I'll wait the extra year to see if the new Zelda has enhanced performance on this new model. I love that OLED screen, could take the throne back from PC handhelds...for maybe a few months until the Steam Deck 2 comes out

 

[bonehead123]

y/a/w/n....

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..

 

[BorisDG]

Please, give us Switch Lite OLED...

 

[Nater]

*waits patiently for Nintendo to continue to not do what their customers want*

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.

 

[ir_cow]

That's alright. I just switched to a EMU for 4K 60FPS gaming. Perfectly legal if you own the games

 

[TechLurker]

At this point, they should partner up with AMD and get a proper custom portable console out. They have more than enough cash to even outdo ASUS on custom SoCs if they wanted. The best thing that would happen is that all games would be platform compatible with no "inferior Nintendo port", given that AMD pretty much controls the major console space (PS and Xbox) and has a sizable share of the PC space.

 

[windwhirl]

inferior Nintendo port

If Nintendo wants to keep going portable, this will keep being a bit of a reality, since a portable system doesn't have the power budget the other consoles will have. Though, sure, at least at the beginning the improvement will be quite the jump.

 

[kondamin]

Waiting for a samsung, mediatek or qualcomm to be able to deliver a powerful chip at a good price which is different enough to make it hard to emulate.

 

[windwhirl]

Waiting for a samsung, mediatek or qualcomm to be able to deliver a powerful chip at a good price which is different enough to make it hard to emulate.

? They all do ARM-based processors/SoC. Same as the Nvidia Tegra powering the Switch.

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.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Its a shame that Sony really let the PSP platform die. Sony have such a massive library of games and im sure some of the older games would have ran pretty well on todays hardware

 

[Xii-Nyth]

why is visual_elements_70 on this guys pfp? howd that get there? firedoge nightly must be acting up again

 

[Gooigi's Ex]

At this point, they should partner up with AMD and get a proper custom portable console out. They have more than enough cash to even outdo ASUS on custom SoCs if they wanted. The best thing that would happen is that all games would be platform compatible with no "inferior Nintendo port", given that AMD pretty much controls the major console space (PS and Xbox) and has a sizable share of the PC space.

That's the last thing Nintendo would ever do. I would think Nintendo is a bit smarter than that to purchase APUs from AMD due to their fight against Emulation. Even though it would be MUCH cheaper for Nintendo to do, they won't do it.

That's alright. I just switched to a EMU for 4K 60FPS gaming. Perfectly legal if you own the games

Would rather do that than waste EVEN more time waiting for Nintendo to make a Switch 2(New Switch...whatever). They hate their customers and hate customers who purchase their games for a LONG period of time and emulate it on a computer. Gonna get the ROG ALLY and emulate Switch games and OH LOOK! Switch 2...

 

[enb141]

? They all do ARM-based processors/SoC. Same as the Nvidia Tegra powering the Switch.

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.

PS1 and PS2 were a pain in the ass for developers too, but emulation was easier than PS3.

Its a shame that Sony really let the PSP platform die. Sony have such a massive library of games and im sure some of the older games would have ran pretty well on todays hardware

Yep, they let it die instead of finding a way to improve it.

 

[cvaldes]

I get the feeling that Furukawa-san just tipped the Switch's successor, whether it be called Switch Pro, Switch 2, or something else really doesn't matter right now.

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.

 

[sLowEnd]

Hopefully their next console's controllers will have better analog sticks.

 

[Xii-Nyth]

Hopefully their next console's controllers will have better analog sticks.

I still like the n64 controller with its one very good stick

 

[Kyan]

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.

I don't think they will go higher than 1080p for handheld, if NVidia is truely their partner, they will probably use DLSS. And remember that 1080p is supported by the switch in docked so no need for 1440p in handheld. I hope they will try to make 4K a thing with some upscaling for docked mode, but nobody should expect too much from nintendo.

 

[QUANTUMPHYSICS]

Also their general attitude of treating their customers as 3rd class citizen will come back to bite them royally.

Some people would argue that Nintendo was "Apple" before Apple was Apple.