Nintendo has confirmed that the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal will take place this fiscal year, but set expectations ahead of June’s Nintendo Direct by stating that this stream will not feature the next generation console.
Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa took to Twitter to make the clarifying statement:
“This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.”
It’s obviously feasible that some of the games set to feature in the Summer Game Fest adjacent stream will be Nintendo Switch 2 launch games or enhanced for the new console, but Nintendo won’t be focussing on the upcoming hardware.
The most recent reporting suggests that Nintendo has pushed back the Nintendo Switch successor from a 2024 launch to Q1 2025, which would match how the Nintendo Switch launched back in early 2017, but mean that this generation has lasted a surprising eight years for Nintendo, considering the underpowered mobile chipset in the hybrid console.
While we expect that the company will stick with the same overall concept for the Nintendo Switch 2 (or whatever it’s called), of having a tablet with removable controllers that can be docked for TV play, we don’t know if there will be full or partial backward compatibility to the Switch’s vast library of games – Nintendo has seemingly acknowledged that this would be quite important, at least. Additionally, while Microsoft and Sony both had cross-generational game releases through the first for years of the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 life cycle, it’s not known if Nintendo will cut the outgoing generation loose entirely, even if they have a track record of cross-gen launch titles like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess across GameCube and Wii, and Breath of the Wild across Wii U and Switch.
