Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company, Nintendo Co., Ltd. NTDOY, has announced plans to unveil a successor to its popular Switch console during the fiscal year ending March 2025.
What Happened: Nintendo, based in Kyoto, has been prolonging the lifespan of the Switch with successful titles such as “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.” The company projects to sell 13.5 million Switch units in the current fiscal year, capitalizing on the potential of the aging device.
Despite this, Nintendo has withheld further information about the new hardware, stating that no disclosure will be made at its Nintendo Direct presentation in June, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
The announcement of a new model could impact current Switch sales. “A lot of users will now hold off buying the current Switch as they know that the new model will come out sometime in 2025,” stated Serkan Toto, founder of Kantan Games consultancy.
In the previous year, Nintendo sold 15.7 million units of the hybrid home-portable device, which was first introduced in March 2017. Despite minor changes to the Switch devices and increasing sales of the OLED model, overall hardware sales have been declining annually.
Why It Matters: Rumors suggest that the upcoming console, tentatively named Switch 2 by fans, aims to address one of the original Switch's criticisms: battery life. The Switch 2 may operate at higher clock speeds when docked for better performance, but at lower speeds when undocked to conserve battery life.
Furthermore, Nintendo is also reserving major titles for the successor device, including “Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door” and “Luigi’s Mansion 2”. The company predicts a 17% drop in software unit sales this year, down to 165 million units.
Additionally, Nintendo issued a takedown request for over 8,500 copies of the code of the Yuzu emulator, a tool used to play Nintendo Switch games on other platforms. This action followed the shutdown of Yuzu in March, which occurred after its owners settled a lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4 million.
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