If you were thinking that 2023 was the year you would see a next-gen Nintendo console, then you could be disappointed. According to an industry analyst, this year is a little too soon for a next-gen Nintendo console and we would be better off looking toward 2024 instead.
A Nintendo Switch successor has been rumored for some time, however, there has been a worrying lack of games announced following the news that the Breath of the Wild sequel would be headlining 2023 for Nintendo.
The man doing all the talking is Piers Harding-Rolls, a research director at Ampere Analysis who suggests the next console will take some time still. When speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Harding-Rolls explained, “I’m not expecting a next-gen Nintendo console in 2023: we have 2024 in our forecasts.” Rolls-Harding also went on record to say that when The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom would be a best-seller for the current Switch, which means a successor console is able to wait its turn.
The Nintendo Switch was first released in 2017 (oh, how time flies) and the success of the console speaks for itself when looking at the sales figures and variety of games. Nintendo has yet to announce any plans for a post-Switch console, but speculation has always been rife regarding the subject.
The Switch has been left the same as it was at launch, but that’s not to say that the company hasn’t tried to implement a few things in the years that followed. Two physical revisions have been released, the Nintendo Switch Lite and the Nintendo Switch OLED, which are two decent little alterations of the original console.
Plans to renovate have always been fresh on the mind of Nintendo heads though because things are not allowed to become stale with a company the size of Nintendo. According to John Linneman of Digital Foundry, there was a plan to release a mid-generation refresh that never materialized. Talking on his very own podcast, Linneman said “I think at one point, internally, from what I can understand from talking to different developers, that there was some kind of mid-generation Switch update planned at one point, but the plans were scrapped in the end.”
The Nintendo Switch might seem old but it’s still a relatively new piece of kit, and although it has become eerily quiet on the release of new games, the console itself still has a lot of life left in it. So, we’ll see what 2024 brings us.
