Nintendo has officially confirmed they will be revealing the Nintendo Switch in this financial year.
On the Nintendo Co. Ltd Twitter account, for the original company in Japan, no less than their CEO, Shuntaro Furukawa, shared this message:
“This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.
We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.”
And just like that, all the speculation of a possible delay for Nintendo’s next console, which grew so rampant that it affected the company’s stock price, has just been debunked. Credit goes to OreXda, AKA Alex Connor, who made the claim there was no delay last week, in defiance of all the previous reporting claiming there was definitely a delay.
Now, we should note that Nintendo’s financial year begins at the 1st of April of every Roman calendar year, and ends at the 31st of March of the following Roman year. That means Furukawa made this announcement at the very start of this financial year, and the timetable he laid out makes it possible that they won’t announce it until 2025, all the way until the end of March 2025.
But as we reported yesterday, speculation had started growing that Nintendo might start talking about their next console in the next financial meeting. Nintendo decided not to leave fans speculating, so Furukawa went ahead and confirmed this news directly to us.
At the same time, Furukawa revealed yet another Nintendo Direct, that will focus on software for the Nintendo Switch. Based on their Financial Results Exploratory document, they do have four announced titles still on the docket:
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is coming May 23, 2024.
- Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is coming on June 27, 2024.
- Pokemon Legends: Z-A is dated for 2025.
- Finally, Metroid Prime 4 is listed, with a release date TBA.
And the most interesting of all is it indicates that Metroid Prime 4 is a temporary name. So we may get a new name for the game when it is officially revealed!
It looks like we will still get announcements for more Switch games than these, to fill out the time until the next console’s actual launch. Auspiciously, Nintendo’s announcement was set on a very good time to have that Nintendo Direct: June, the month made famous by E3. So we’ll just have to wait and see what games we can look forward to to cap off the Switch’s run.
