According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
Is this the first mention of a Switch 2?
Officially yes. As far as I know they haven’t mentioned anything about next console before.
There’s been lots of rumours regarding the existence and the chips and etc. The only thing official before this was “We have no plans to release new hardware before the next fiscal year.”, i.e. April 2024 is the earliest we could see it.
Some people also see the whole “Nintendo telling the Mario + Rabbids crew they should have waited for the next console for the sequel” thing to mean a new console is somewhat near. I don’t believe that’s indicative of that though.
Rumours of next Switch started from 2018, if I recall correctly, so I am just going to ignore that. Don’t care much about leaks and rumours anyway.
Yeah, people are saying that, but I don’t think it means the opposite. If next console was close, Ubisoft could have just waited, but they thought “Na, the wait’s too long, let’s release it now!”.
Also, they probably didn’t have that discussion just before game launch, they probably had it somewhere during early-to-mid development. It would be weird if Nintendo said nothing while Ubisoft was developing the game (with their input on characters etc.), and then when they were ready to launch Nintendo said, “Why are you launching it, wait!”
Sounds like backwards compatibility is a lock—not that it’s a huge hurdle for today’s machines—since most of the account features involve software and save data. The retro game archives will probably make the jump too, since keeping them locked behind a paid membership is probably more lucrative than the Virtual Console ever was.
Anyone who has ever transferred their account to a new Switch knows how easy it is, for the most part. The biggest chore is redownloading software data, so maybe Nintendo will allow full game data to transfer over via SD card this time.
I just hope it’s fully backward compatible, and they keep the hybrid design. I love it. Rest they can play around as they like.
All nintendo has to do is make a higher resolution OLED display, a bigger battery, and a modern day chip. Heck, they can even go Snapdragon.
More memory storage would be great too, especially if the trend towards digital only distribution continues. I’d prefer continued commitment to physical media, but now publishers are even pushing it more towards the disk/SD card basically just holding DRM for a game you still have to download, not to mention DLC and updates. I don’t even have a particularly large Switch library but my 128 GB SD card is filling up fast.
I am digital only, and my 200GB filled up fast. The only silver lining is, since Switch doesn’t support 4K, the size of games is smaller, so it can still have lots of games installed.
Nintendo invested quite a bit in their NVN api from Nvidia so I would imagine they would like to keep that going for at least another cycle. It would also help with ensuring developers are still comfortable developing the system for potentially both the new and older models.
That’s what we want, but it’s Nintendo, they are going to do some “nintendo magic” with it. So, I am only hoping they don’t change the basic things.
The hybrid design is probably the way they’re going to go. I’d love a higher spec one that isn’t though, even if it’s just a pipe dream. The ideal set-up for me personally would be:
-
“New Switch Lite” - Undockable, permanently handheld, like the Switch Lite but with better hardware.
-
“New Switch” - Dockable, again like the Switch, but better hardware.
-
“New Switch Pro” - Undockable, permanently docked, better hardware than the New Switch.
New Switch obviously not the best name, but my creativity is bankrupt. At least it’s not Switch U.
Just saving this comment for when “Switch U” is officially announced in April 2024 😅
It is Nintendo after all
If they announce a Switch U, having not learnt from the Wii U, I will be genuinely shocked. Do feel free to remind me if that occurs!
They lost 90% of their sales the last time they added that letter, I doubt the would do it again.
Switch V.
-
Wait so back to the superior system to what the Wii U had??
No more friend codes???
I suspect the “you will keep your * game library” is missing the “*compatible*”.
Making a game working on a new hardware is a big amount of work, especially for tiny teams.
So ether the softwares are binary compatible (a Switch binary work on the new hardware without modification), ether we will lost many games.
Wait and see…
As a Metroid Prime Remaster buyer, I’m a little sad to realize we will maybe not see the 2 and 3 on Switch. :-(
I just hope it doesn’t come out before holiday 2024. I’m too broke Nintendo, you already took all my money this year, let me recover for a bit
Haha, I can understand it. I don’t think it will release before that. They will have at least half an year between announcement and release of the console, and it doesn’t seem like they are going to announce anything this year.
deleted by creator
Well, I don’t understand your reasoning completely. You liked Wii U because it failed? I personally don’t care about homebrew, I buy consoles to play games, if there are no games, what’s the point.
Switch is currently my favourite console, so don’t really want next Nintendo console to fail. Want it to succeed even more than Switch.
