Nintendo to announce Switch successor before March 2025

Nintendo will introduce a successor to the Switch sometime “within this fiscal year” ending March 2025, president Shuntaro Furukawa wrote in post to X. This differs slightly from reports that the next-gen console will be announced this year, as it could be revealed as early as 2025.

The company added that it won’t be releasing any details about the Switch 2 (or whatever it will be called) at the upcoming Nintendo Direct event in June, so we won’t hear anything until at least the second half of 2024.

“It will be more than nine years since we announced the Nintendo Switch in March 2015,” Furukawa wrote. “We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the second half of 2024, but note that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”

Nintendo also dropped its earnings report, which contained both good and bad news. The company had already raised its sales forecast for the Switch for the last fiscal year to 15.5 million units, but it surpassed that figure with 15.7 million units sold for the full year ending March 2024. Although less than the previous year (17.97 million units), this helped Nintendo increase sales and operating profit by 4.4 and 4.9 percent, respectively, over the year.

Things won’t be so rosy in fiscal 2025, however, as the company predicts Switch sales will fall to 13.5 million units for the year ending March 2025. That would translate to 19.3% and 24, 4% decline in net sales and operating profit, resp.

Nintendo has done a good job keeping Switch sales up, considering the console went on sale more than seven years ago. This was largely helped last year by games, including bestsellers The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Now that Nintendo has given a time frame for the release of the new console, however, interest in buying the current Switch can’t help but decrease. The company no doubt hopes that several upcoming titles, incl Paper Mario (May 23) and Luigi’s Mansion 2 (June 27), will help juice sales.