Nintendo is cutting back 120 contractor roles ahead of the release of Switch 2, which is yet to be officially announced. Some of the employees will be laid off while others will be transferred to a different roles within the company.
Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was the one who apparently was told about the situation. This isn’t as shocking as it might should be considering just how many companies within the video game industry have been letting hundreds go over the past few months, causing some games to even be canceled.
Employees that will be switched to different full-time roles will be apart of the testing department, which adds to the fact that a new console is probably closer than we think if they need more testers already. Nintendo made a comment of “a significant number of new full-time employee positions.”
Nintendo won’t give a release day for the new console they have been working on until it is just about to hit the shelves and is ready to go. This is something we definitely saw with the Nintendo Switch. A lot of us didn’t see it coming until one Nintendo Direct just dropped information about it, soon later a pre-order announcment being shown as well. However, it is said that the console was delayed from this year to 2025, but sometime early in that year.
This delay could be due to the fact that they want to get in more testing to make sure the product is ready for AAA titles and first party games. For now, that is all the information we have, but we will keep you updated.