Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has outlined Nintendo Switch’s longevity, and it’s a whole lot longer than you probably expect.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Furukawa said this in an interview with Japanese newspaper outlet Nikkei:
“We are still working on software for the Switch for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025.
In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, we hope to sustain the momentum of Zelda and the [Super Mario Bros] movie, with focus on the holiday sales season. As for hardware, we will maximize not only new demand for the hardware, but also for those buying second consoles and replacements.”
As a reminder, the Nintendo Switch launched in March of 2017. Furukawa is saying that their plans for the console will extend its support for new software for eight years. That’s not unprecedented, but quite a long timeframe for the company to be releasing games for a single platform.
To put this in context, the original release of the NES dates all the way back to July 15, 1983, in its native country of Japan, as the Family Computer. The last game Nintendo released for the NES was the falling block puzzler Wario’s Woods, which released in Europe in 1995. That’s a staggering 12 year gap, which was partly extended because of the limitations of global distribution without a digital storefront at the time.
We do need to also remember that Nintendo’s norms really are to keep releasing software for their console for a year or two after they have replaced that game hardware with a brand new console. For example, the 3DS was launched in 2010. The last game Nintendo released for the 3DS was Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarn. That game released in 2019, two years after the launch of the Nintendo Switch, but also nearly a decade after the 3DS was launched.
Now, we have spent recent weeks covering rumors of the hypothetical Switch 2. If rumors are to be believed, this Switch 2 features a chipset that will support DLSS and other cutting edge technologies from Nvidia. That tech will allow the Switch 2 to catch up to some degree to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Multiple sources are even touting the return of game parity for Nintendo.
Based on the precedents Nintendo have set, they are bound to officially reveal the Switch 2 between now and March 2025. It’s even possible that they will squeeze in an announcement of the Switch 2 before this year ends.
There has been rampant speculation about the specific date that Nintendo will reveal and launch this Switch 2 elsewhere. I am just going to point out, that Furukawa’s declared support timeline for the Nintendo Switch is an implicit declaration that the company will be announcing the Nintendo Switch within these two years and not later than that.
