Nintendo says it plans to announce the followup to its popular Switch console by March 2025.
“We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” Shuntaro Furukawa, the company’s president, wrote on X on Tuesday. “It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.”
The announcement will be welcome news to fans who have been salivating for years over the prospect of a potential Switch successor, which Nintendo bosses have remained tight lipped about.
Sales have been flagging recently. The company expects to sell 13.5 million Switch units in the current financial year, according to Reuters, compared to sales of 15.7 million units last year.
Nintendo has a long and storied track record of reinventing the wheel for both consoles and games, and the Switch has been one of its most successful products to date. When it first launched in 2017, it took the world by storm primarily for its portability.
At a time when major rivals like Playstation and Xbox were developing stationary consoles with increasingly impressive graphics and processing power, Nintendo opted for another route.
The handheld Switch could be used both as a console for a television at home, and also be thrown into a bag and played on the move.
While its graphic performance was much lower than its Sony (SONY) and Microsoft (MSFT) rivals, consumers didn’t mind thanks to the plethora of entertaining and often family friendly games in Nintendo’s stable.
Over the last seven years, little has changed in terms of the Switch’s development with three distinct models currently available for prospective owners.
There’s the Nintendo Switch OLED and its rich, immersive screen; the standard Nintendo Switch with its tried-and-true hybrid design; and the cheaper and smaller Nintendo Switch Lite for those who mainly play on the go.
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