Yesterday, Nintendo officially unveiled its Switch 2 handheld via a first look video presentation. Featured content did not come as a surprise to many gaming enthusiasts—a steady flow of leaks have already revealed outer and inner workings. Earlier today, the Digital Foundry team has offered their collective opinion on Nintendo's formal announcement. Their roundtable discussion first focused on the Switch 2's physical appearance—mainly a showcased physical increase in size, when lined up against the preceding (standard) model. Conversation quickly moved onto technical matters—a topic that Nintendo normally avoids discussing. The video presentation included in-game footage of a next-gen Mario Kart title—Oliver Mackenzie (a contributing DF video producer/writer) was not impressed by this short demo's visual fidelity. He noted an absence of DLSS image enhancement—surprising, given that the rumored NVIDIA Tegra T239 SoC is capable of deploying this graphics technology.

John, Rich and Oliver then moved onto discussing recently leaked clock speeds and performance figures (in handheld and docked modes)—overall, they reckon that these numbers seem fitting for a hybrid system. They noticed that the handheld GPU clock was lower than expected—based on their judgement of the Switch 2's fairly capable integrated cooling solution. In the past, Digital Foundry theorized that the NVIDIA-designed Tegra T239 will be an 8 nanometer part—rumored to be built on Samsung 8 nm DUV foundry node. Newer gaming community-generated proposals have suggested a shift to Samsung's 5 nm EUV node—mostly based on the chipset's physical footprint. In sharp contrast, the Digital Foundry guys are sticking with their 8 nm theory. Richard Leadbetter (DF's founder) has previously attempted to simulate Switch 2-esque performance on readily available Ampere-based hardware—he could revisit and perform tests on a laptop that sports Team Green's GeForce RTX 2050 mobile GPU. He believes that the leaked CPU and GPU clocks (across both modes) present plausible evidence of 8 nm-level performance, cross-referenced with his team's past analysis of the system's PCB. Debates will inevitably rage on, but Rich insists that the end result will be an example of "Occam's razor." The Tegra T239's four (long alleged) Cortex A78 cores appeared to be running at a higher frequency in portable mode than in docked—suggesting some unknown factors; perhaps a switching on or off of cores (situation dependent). Leadbetter and Co. will be looking forward to getting a proper hands-on experience at Nintendo's April to June launch events.

Nintendo has published its quarterly financial results for the period ending March 31 (2024)—the numbers indicate that their trusty Switch hybrid console has continued to sell surprisingly well, despite industry watchdogs anticipating a sharp decline in late 2023. A Bloomberg Japan report has extracted crucial information from an important corporate investor call—Shuntaro Furukawa, the current company president, announced another sales milestone. The Switch has reached 139.36 million units sold (as of 31st December 2023) since its original rollout back in March 2017—it has the potential to outsell Sony's classic PlayStation 2 home console. Nintendo's CEO adhered to his company's strict script and did not address the big red elephant in the (conference) room—the highly anticipated Switch successor is an industry open secret—instead focusing on the current iteration being their "main business" going into FY2024-2025.

Despite recent "better than expected" financial figures, the Nintendo Switch is on a sales decline (going back several years)—the gaming community expected improved hardware to arrive at some point before 2024, but the House of Mario is in no rush to take on current generation Sony and Microsoft home console models. Furukawa-san stated that Nintendo will discuss its plans for the financial future during a May earnings briefing—this is largely in line with past declarations, the "Switch 2" is not arriving before Spring 2024. The latest reports suggest that the next Nintendo Direct presentation is scheduled for next week—perhaps February 15. Microsoft's Phil Spencer has teased a major Xbox "business update" announcement within the same timeframe.

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.