Tuesday, May 9th 2023
Nintendo President: No New Switch Until at Least Spring 2024
Earlier today Nintendo released its financial/earning reports for the fiscal year ending March 2023, and company president Shuntaro Furukawa has briefed investors about sales forecasts, according to a report published by Bloomberg. Furukawa-san predicts that the Switch gaming console will only sell 15 million units over the next fiscal year - sales have been slowing down for a while according to Nintendo's figures, with almost 18 million units purchased throughout 2022-23. The numbers are still very impressive when you consider that Nintendo's flagship gaming platform has been on the market for just over six years - across that span of time, total unit sales have hit the 125.62 million mark.
Furukawa also informed shareholders about the prospect of a Switch console successor arriving within the next fiscal period - Bloomberg's article brings the bad news at this point - it seems that Nintendo is not anticipating a new hardware launch within that time frame. Nintendo's software release schedule - especially in regards to first party titles - looks very threadbare for the rest of the year. The much anticipated Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Friday (May 12) followed by Pikmin 4 in July, but things look to be quiet after that - unless Nintendo has a few surprises lined up for June's preview event season. Rumors of a next generation Switch have been doing the rounds since 2020, back then a "Pro" model was often touted - fans later found out that Nintendo had simply refreshed the system with an OLED panel, some tweaks to chipset efficiency, and updated the docking system to modern output standards - this premium model hit the market in late 2021.Discussions of a proper Switch "2" have pointed to leaked information about Nintendo possibly partnering up with NVIDIA again - the current model runs on a customized version of Team Green's Tegra X1 SoC. Tipsters reckon that the successor is going to be based on an Orin-series chipset, granting use of an Ampere architecture GPU - thus enabling DLSS on a hybrid home/handheld console. A chipset codenamed "Drake" (with a model code of T239) has emerged from various leaks, but a few folks think that Nintendo and NVIDIA have dropped Tegra in favor of something more cutting-edge.
Furukawa also informed shareholders about the prospect of a Switch console successor arriving within the next fiscal period - Bloomberg's article brings the bad news at this point - it seems that Nintendo is not anticipating a new hardware launch within that time frame. Nintendo's software release schedule - especially in regards to first party titles - looks very threadbare for the rest of the year. The much anticipated Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives on Friday (May 12) followed by Pikmin 4 in July, but things look to be quiet after that - unless Nintendo has a few surprises lined up for June's preview event season. Rumors of a next generation Switch have been doing the rounds since 2020, back then a "Pro" model was often touted - fans later found out that Nintendo had simply refreshed the system with an OLED panel, some tweaks to chipset efficiency, and updated the docking system to modern output standards - this premium model hit the market in late 2021.Discussions of a proper Switch "2" have pointed to leaked information about Nintendo possibly partnering up with NVIDIA again - the current model runs on a customized version of Team Green's Tegra X1 SoC. Tipsters reckon that the successor is going to be based on an Orin-series chipset, granting use of an Ampere architecture GPU - thus enabling DLSS on a hybrid home/handheld console. A chipset codenamed "Drake" (with a model code of T239) has emerged from various leaks, but a few folks think that Nintendo and NVIDIA have dropped Tegra in favor of something more cutting-edge.