Nintendo may be revealing their next console to industry insiders in this coming Gamescom.
Take this rumor with a grain of salt, but as our source Start Menu points out, there are enough things lining up that makes this rumor credible.
Start Menu also pointed out they were tipped off about this all the way back in July, and chose not to report on it then.
Obviously, what changed their mind is the sudden flood of rumors from credible sources that developers already have dev kits for that new console.
Start Menu doesn’t know if Nintendo is actually going to have a huge presentation for the console at the event. They could, alternatively, hold a Nintendo Direct at the same time Gamescom is being held, and then have a presentation on the show floor after the Direct.
Nintendo is in a bit of a pickle when it comes to revealing their next console. They first revealed the Nintendo Wii in E3 2005, and the Wii U in E3 2011. The Nintendo Switch was revealed with a tweet in 2016, due to some mitigating circumstances. Chief among them was that the console was simply not ready for reveal for that year’s E3, but was also close to release.
This year, as you may already know, E3 was cancelled. That big venue for revealing a major announcement like the next Nintendo console isn’t there anymore, like it had been in previous years.
Nintendo could opt to reveal the console’s name and appearance online again, but even then, Twitter itself is not what it used to be.
Nintendo could have opted to bring it to an event in Japan, but Gamescom is as high profile and prominent an event as E3 that it would be a worthy platform for such an announcement.
The Nintendo Switch successor is very much an open secret at this point. We already knew that Nintendo was putting their finishing touches on this project and that it’s close to release. The Nintendo Switch itself received an unexpected boom from the pandemic, after the chaotic boom it already experienced in the years before that, from being the return of the Steam store for indies.
Nintendo knows the hardware is way overdue for an upgrade, not just because of the Xbox and PlayStation, but the Steam Deck and preponderance of other gaming handhelds in the market now.
Nvidia is more than ready to supply Nintendo with upgrades for their SOCs as well, to gamely compete with AMDs new mobile gaming chips. They may bring high end performance, but AMD doesn’t seem to have the power/battery management side figured out even until now.
If the big rumor of a 2024 release is real, Nintendo really could be starting to talk about the successor this early. We’re sure many gamers are hoping that that’s precisely what Nintendo does.
