Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

I think the Splatoon 3 content is another sign of any September Direct being later on in the month (my prediction was week starting September 18th and I'm sticking with it). You've got the usual season start on September 1st but then you've got Big Run and then a Splatfest. Also they announced Deep Cut amiibo for November.

@skywake I appreciate your perspective. But if the reports that dev kits are just now getting into the hands of third party developers is accurate, I think the idea of an announcement in 2025 for release in early 2026 still tracks. Game development, especially 4K fidelity development is only getting longer. Figure the quickest a game would be churned out is what...eighteen months?

I'm sure Nintendo has launch games that are (six to twelve months already) well into development. But Nintendo has a history of holding software from release until they feel it necessary to pull the trigger. So even if the Switch falls short of its expect sales target (15m I think?), I feel any Switch sales figure north of 10m will keep Switch 2 in Nintendo's warehouse. Give developers more lead time to bolster the successor's launch lineup and offer more back compat games on day-one.

Of course, I wouldn't mind being wrong. I'm as eager for new hardware as everyone else.

@Magician summer of next year for a fall/holiday launch

@Magician Wasn't the current rumor that the system itself isn't 4K, but the chipset being used allows things to be scaled to such automatically?

@Magician
The thing is the hardware isn't that different. How much time do you think Nintendo spent on BotW with the Switch hardware in hand? How much of that development time was without it? And this was with a much more significant change in hardware

I would think a lot of the early games that launch will either be small or titles that started their life being developed for Switch. If developers have kits in their hands already and have had them for 6-12 months now? The end of next year is 18-28 months from them getting the Dev kits. Plenty of time to pivot development or make a mid tier game from scratch

Not to mention that a lot of larger developers could start work on a new game while having another team work on a port of a last gen (PS4/Xbox1) game for launch. A port should have a much faster turn around than a game made from scratch.

This isn't the early 90s. The bulk of game development time would be taken up by level design, game mechanics, asset development and so on. And when you interact with the hardware it would be via an API that would be significantly different between companies but probably doesn't change much within. Or even more likely you're developing to an engine that sits between you and the much of the API

Gone are the days of working to specific combinations of graphical modes to achieve a specific effect by manipulating memory between frames. Or having to worry about how some funky quirk of a particular architecture will impact performance. All platforms are largely the same, it's a large part of why most games are multiplatform these days

Of course there's still time required to port and optimisation still matters but it's not a burn it all and start again scenario

Are we all in agreement that Nintendo won't say a word to the public about the successor during Gamescom? Strictly for behind-closed-doors dealings with their third party partners. Getting the ball rolling on ports that every new generation of hardware needs. I'm hopeful for several PS4 to Switch 2 availability (Elden Ring, Guilty Gear Strive, Devil May Cry 5, etc) early in the lifecycle.

@Magician I think that’s a solid expectation to agree upon. I’m also expecting Ubisoft to port some games like that Prince of Persia remake that’s in development hell and probably Far Cry 6 and some more older Assassin’s Creed games.

It would be shocking if they said anything official so soon. If nothing else, why would they say any exciting news at all before the (probable) September Nintendo direct. That said, I don't know why they would say anything this year at all given that it would probably hurt holiday Switch 1 sales.

I agree. They'll reveal it during the February Direct at the earliest, maybe even June if it's released late in the year.

How much would it hurt holiday sales. Full disclosre, not trying to convince anyone either way, just a train of thought.

I don't think someone planning to buy a Switch this year (in the 7th year of it's life) is the same person that is going to be buying a Switch 2 day one.

Holiday sales will be a lot of kids who asked for a Switch for Christmas after watching the Mario movie.

I don't personally think they will reveal anything. I think it simply a case of the holiday season is too important a time to be thinking about anything else. I just wouldn't get why they would want to have so much going on at the most important time of the year.

@Magician
If it's late next year I don't see why they would. There's little reason to announce in late August if you intend to release in like November the next year. We're going to get something like 6 months between announcement and release I'd think

And if it was for the first half of next year? Either Nintendo is being particularly good keeping the leaks under control this time around or the hardware isn't all that novel. Because I would have expected more smoke if they were announcing in October or something

Certainly there would be behind closed doors NDA heavy discussions going on already

For the record I do agree with @GrailUK re holiday sales. Different demographics, doesn't really matter. I just think the short pre release cycle works better and I've seen little to suggest it's going to launch in February next year or something. As much as I wouldn't be complaining if they did

I see we've gone from the "new hardware is right around the corner, it's going to be announced any day now!" part of the cycle to the "of course they're not going to announce it now, but it's still right around the corner" part of the cycle.

Yes, a few people would be interested in a more powerful Switch just as a few people were interested in a more powerful Wii. The Wii U still turned out to be a massive flop, because there aren't that many of them.

No, Zelda Tears of the Kingdom would not have sold more units with a new system. A game is going to sell more on a system with a 100,000,000+ userbase, which is very difficult to replicate. Only the Nintendo DS and PS2 ever beat those numbers, and only four of Nintendo's seven home consoles were actually successful in the first place. When you capture lightning in a bottle like Nintendo did with the Switch, you continue supporting the system with blockbuster software releases for many years. Hardware makes very little profit margin, whereas they can sell a game like Zelda at 90 bucks a pop with hardly any manufacturing cost. GotY is meaningless, and Nintendo has only ever won it once. It doesn't and shouldn't affect their decisions on when to release a new console.

Silly comment. In 2012, the successor to the DS had already been out for a year. And it almost failed spectacularly, it took a big price drop and several clever hardware revisions to clean that up. Its sister console, the Wii U, wasn't so fortunate. In 2023 the Switch is still going strong (despite selling at the same MSRP as it did in 2017), E ticket games like Zelda (and non-E ticket games like Pikmin) are topping the charts, graphics are about as good as they will ever get for a screen of that size (there was still room for improvement with the DS), and console generations continue to get longer as graphical advances get more and more marginal. New Nintendo home consoles are rarely announced and released in the same year, and Nintendo's president said as late as February 2022 that the Switch was midway through its lifecycle (putting the Switch 2 release date at 2026 or later).

@Euler
If you're not going to read any of my comment and instead pick single statements out of context don't bother. Obviously the situation we're in is not like the DS in 2007 because in 2007 the DS was only 3 years old. Instead what we're talking about is new hardware late next year, when the Switch will be over 7 years old

So yes, your position is like the position of my friend at UNI. Except in a parallel universe where the DSi didn't happen and the 3DS didn't launch in early 2011 and we were instead talking in 2011 about new hardware in 2012

As I said, there's always someone arguing your position right up until the new hardware is out. They look increasingly silly the closer that date gets. And equally there are always people like me looking at what's possible and considering the whats and whens of the next thing. And, frankly, I think I have a pretty damn good track record judging this stuff

Edit: I'd also note that in reality land DS sales the year before the 3DS released dropped 25% to 20mill. Their forecast for Switch this year is 15mill units which is down around 20%. And last year it was at 18mill, also down 20%. It's still the "best selling console" but companies want growth

By a few, I'll just give you the benefit of doubt and assume you mean the more realistic 'a few 10s of millions'. Also, know what one of the complaints about Wii U was? That it wasn't enough of an upgrade. People wanted even more power. Hopefully Switch 2 learns from that and strikes the right balance. Of course an even bigger issue with the Wii U was most people didn't know what the heck a Wii U was ("it's just some weird peripheral for a Wii right?"). So no, the Wii U didn't sell badly because people didn't want a more powerful console.

Switch 2 wouldn't instantly sell to the 125 million user base. Nintendo would have to support both and slowly transition people over ("ug, I have had Switch for 5 years and my controllers died. Should I get more? Nah, I guess I'll get a PS5 instead.. wait a Switch 2 is out!!").

Also, know what has sold even more than Switch? The number of PS4s (115 million) + the number of PS5s (40 million). Both of those consoles are more powerful than Switch and together they sold more. I'm sure Nintendo wouldn't mind stealing a few people from that huge pool of 'likes fancy graphics/more power' players. Since PS4 overlapped with Wii U, it almost certainly stole some users from Nintendo first.

I'd argue one of Nintendo's biggest mistakes of the late Wii and early Wii U era was that they waited too long. If there had been a mid-gen refresh of Wii somewhere a bit under the Wii U spec around 2010, no tablet just HDMI out and some games running at 720p. Then held out until say 2015 to drop something along the lines of Switch skipping the Wii U half step? I think they could've done better

There were a lot of people upgrading from Wii to 360/PS3 around 2009-2013, Nintendo never really capitalised on that. The Wii U was somewhat of an attempt but it was too late and the price was too high to grab that market

@skywake I remember the rumours at the time that Nintendo were going to release a Wii HD console and then Nintendo came out and denied it all.

@FragRed
It was less rumours and more just analysts speaking their mind on what should happen. One in particular. I think with hindsight it's fair to say they were probably right given the obvious fact that the transition from Wii wasn't exactly smooth

But yeah, the idea that the Wii U failed because it was too powerful is ludicrous. Bad value? Sure. Poorly explained? 100%. The fact that they stuck with PPC at a point when everyone was moving to x86 also didn't help. But too powerful? That ain't it

You know what? I know this is all kinda off topic but this is an interesting chain here. But talk is kinda meaningless without data. Lets get some data up in here:

The above shows sales for each platform by year as a percentage of total lifetime sales adjusted to have the launches align. In this context year "0" is the last year where the console didn't exist for the majority of the year and year "1" is the first full year of sales. It's like this so we can compare them. Same deal with adjusting to total lifetime sales, gives you an idea of when most of the sale occurred while ignoring sales numbers

The general point but, the shape of the graph and when it falls off. It's fair to say that the Switch is tracking fairly similarly to the DS. Note in this graph the 3DS launched around year 6/7. The Wii in comparison, sales were falling off a cliff well before the Wii U (year 6). And the Gameboy is obviously a different story entirely, Pokemon is what makes it an outlier

Actually, here's the Switch, the Gameboy and the median of EVERY console cycle Nintendo has had. Shows how unusual the Gameboy was a bit clearer and also where the Switch sits. Certainly a long lived console but clearly in decline

Usually on that graph new hardware would come out around the 5. With the Gameboy it had a revision on the 9 and a successor on the 12. What I'm suggesting is that we'll probably see new hardware for Switch on the 8. Late next year