After the big misstep that was the Wii U, Nintendo fully regained its stride with the wildly successful Switch, and though the system is quite aged at this point, the company is apparently still not totally ready to move on to the future.
Those who were hoping to see the Nintendo Switch successor console revealed and and then released within the coming months are likely going to be waiting a while longer.
Developers are reportedly being told not to expect the new Nintendo system to release before the end of the current fiscal year.
This report comes from GamesIndustry leader Chris Dring discussing what he’s hearing from people across multiple studios about Nintendo’s plans in their latest podcast.
The current fiscal year is slated to run through March 31, 2025, so the earliest the new console could arrive then would be April 1 although probably later than that.
“No developer I’ve spoken to expects it to be launching this financial year,” said Dring. “In fact, they’ve been told not to expect it in the [current] financial year. A bunch of people I spoke to hope it’s out in April or May time, still early next year, not late.”
While said report may be disappointing to eager fans, it’s ultimately not all that surprising.
Previously, Nintendo said back in May that they planned to announce their new console during this fiscal year, and we’re already half-way through August with no real sign of it yet.
They still have seven months in their financial year to do so, and the reveal will come months ahead of the eventual release to help build hype and get pre-order / launch forecasts in place.
Last month, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa stated they left off the new system from their financial forecast to surprise consumers in a positive way — though now it seems their reasoning is also that the system won’t be out to make an impact on it.
It appeared for quite some time that Nintendo was gearing up for a release in 2024 before rumors began swirling that big launch was delayed until 2025 to supposedly shore up its first-party lineup of games.
As of June 30, the Switch has sold a staggering 143.42 million systems worldwide, which puts it only behind the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS as the best selling gaming hardware of all time, so it’s not hard to see why the company would be reluctant to move on from their big breadwinner.
What a new Nintendo console will mean for the fighting game community remains to be seen, but it has the potential to shake things up if it can prove to be at least comparable to the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S and keep that portability factor.
While titles like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 skipped over the Switch, other developers including NetherRealm Studios continued to push Mortal Kombat for the hybrid system.
If the new system is capable, we could likely see SF6, Tekken, Guilty Gear Strive and others come in to support the new hardware that’s still building a lot of anticipation.
Plus, there’s whatever future plans Nintendo has in store for Super Smash Bros. as well.
We know Smash series creator Masahiro Sakurai is ending his YouTube channel to move on to his next gaming project, and the Bandai Namco team who helped develop Super Smash Bros. Ultimate recently hired new members too.
Unless there’s a Deluxe version of Ultimate in the works, however, a brand new Smash is still likely years away.
We should be learning a bunch more about Nintendo’s future plans in the coming months.