Topic: When do you think Nintendo's next console will be released?

I'm of the view that a Switch successor is not on the table for a long while. Instead we're more likely to see a series of hardware revisions. I don't see any value in abandoning the Switch library and Nintendo have made a point of saying this is their long term strategy since 2014 or so

But the OLED model doesn't make that much sense to me so who knows

I'm still trying to figure it out myself. How about this.

Nintendo is and has been working on the next console ever since 2017. It will be hybrid just like the Switch, but more powerful. It will have an OLED screen. Only, Nintendo realised that if they launch it at the same time they release the OLED Switch, very few Switch copies will be sold in the end. Everybody would rather buy the brand new console. So their only choice is to sell the OLED Switch now.

The OLED makes sense in that it's two years since the last - largely silent because it was internal changes only - revision that came out alongside the Lite.

They'll probably make another refresh in a couple more years too. Whether it includes improved hardware depends on a lot of factors, but I'd doubt that concern about what the competition is up to is going to be high on the list.

Let's not forget that this is the company that let the GameBoy run for nine years without a significant hardware revision right through what was probably the hottest period in history for CPU and graphics developments. While I don't think they'll try to get that much out of the Switch without a hardware upgrade, they're probably not going to get rushed into making one just for the sake of it.

@Matt_Barber
The GB was king on price and battery life though so it was slightly different. Also the main leap in the 90s in terms of tech were optical media and 3D, things which didn't really scale down to portables until the early 2000s. Compare that to the last couple of decades where the main push has been in mobile.

Also I would argue that Steam Deck and Switch were both about 6-7 years behind non-portable hardware at launch. Both are/were really pushing the limit of portable gaming. The PSP and Vita were similar. So it's not like Nintendo hasn't been pushing the spec.

Problem is, Switch is now almost 5 years old. So we're back to being where Nintendo usually is at launch, minus the usual budget pricing

Early for good behavior.

@skywake The GB was only really king on battery life against the generation of machines it was first up against like the Lynx and the GameGear. Lessons were learned with subsequent devices and later competitors like the WonderSwan and NGP lasted just as long as it, as well as being considerably more powerful.

Also, I'd dispute that there weren't big leaps in portable devices during the lifetime of the GameBoy. We went from analogue brick mobile phones to compact digital ARM-based ones that played games, and PDAs went from glorified calculators to the Palm Pilot. The first practical smartphones started to appear around the mid-90s too.

I'd think that the key factor in the life of the GameBoy was that Nintendo were still capable of eking popular games out of the aging hardware. Pokemon didn't come along until it was seven years old, for instance. If they can manage to keep doing that with the Switch too, it might similarly not need a mid-generation upgrade.

@Matt_Barber
I'm not sure how citing late very 90s Japan only devices proves your point. I mean in 1998-2001 the GB was looking tired. But this was also when they released the GBC and not long before GBA

Although you are right that Pokemon kept the GB going. That was definitely a factor. However I'm not sure Nintendo can lean on another Pokemon like release. There have only ever been a few releases of that scale. Most consoles don't get a game as big as Tetris, Pokemon, Wii Sports

I'd view the GBC as the mid-life (although decidedly leaning towards the end) refresh of the GB. It certainly wasn't nearly as powerful as the WonderSwan or NGP either but offered just was enough for Nintendo to hold their own in an era where they decidedly couldn't cite battery life as much of an advantage. I'd still think that the first party games library was their main strength though.

So far as Pokemon goes, I'm not expecting Nintendo to whip a brand new franchise out of nowhere to extend the life of the Switch but I'm more bringing it up to point to how they can still get big games out on an ageing system. The Switch almost certainly will see more Pokemon games too, and they'll continue to shift hardware.

Anyway, I'm rather playing devil's advocate here because nobody else is making the case for how Nintendo could scrape through an entire generation without a refresh with improved hardware. I'd prefer that they did release an upgraded model, because there enough games that could use a performance boost just to stave off the frame rate dips and resolution scaling. I just don't think that there's a pressing commercial case that they'd absolutely have to.

@Matt_Barber
If we want to be pedantic about the GBC it did have 2x the CPU clock, 2x the VRAM, 4x the RAM and obviously a significantly improved screen. If they did the same jump with the Switch it'd be approaching the spec of the Steam Deck..... but we'd get it in 2025

I mean of course you're right in the sense that the Gameboy is a prime example of Nintendo holding out and not upgrading hardware. It's also a prime example of software allowing them to delay new hardware. But it's a bit of an exception to the rule I think. And even the Gameboy eventually got a revision that allowed it to keep going

Another example might be the Wii/GC transition where they avoided pushing the spec. Effectively the Wii, internally, was a minor hardware revision of the GC. And it wasn't long after the Wii launch when the spec started to look tired. Around 2010 the party was well and truly over and Nintendo suffered for not reacting fast enough.

Basically, the Switch spec is ok right now. It's not a compelling spec but it's still servicable. Problem is Nintendo shouldn't be thinking about sales for today. They should be thinking about sales in 2023/2024. If we don't see a spec revision next year they leave themselves open to someone sniping their position.

Sometime, I think some folk prefer hardware over software. Instead of appreciating what games are on / coming to the system, they get tied down it what it can't do. And tbh, what it can't do doesn't limit creative imagination contrary to what companies wanting you to buy the latest gen say (unless they really are that dependent on it).

Late 2023 to early 2024 would be my guess. Although "not soon enough" would be the correct answer. My main concern is backwards compatibility. I've invested heavily in my Switch collection, but Nintendo could easily just ask customers to start from scratch with zero backwards compatibility between the the current Switch and its successor.

Yes, but on the plus side it'd be about the same size and have the same battery life.

I'd think that the problem with making a Switch Pro now is that the only way to get more performance from a compatible device would be to build a SoC of the same basic architecture but with more cores and higher clock speeds, which is going to make it more power hungry, and require a bulkier and more expensive device overall.

That's the current trade off you'd have to make with the Steam Deck, and Valve don't really have the option because they've simply got to provide enough performance to make almost all PC games playable on it, even if a number of them will fall foul of other issues.

Nintendo can wait a while for the tech to get smaller, cheaper and less power hungry. 2023-4 sounds about right to me, as that would allow them to leverage Nvidia's next generation of SoC. Maybe late next year if they're uncharacteristically eager, but I'd think that unlikely.

I'd say 2023. They really can't wait any longer than that to come out with stronger hardware, and I doubt they'll come out with a Pro version 6 years after release when we're already supposed to be "halfway through" the Switch's lineup. We're staring down the barrel of a successor in the next few years at this point.

Well that's where I think you get it wrong. Of course at the same point in time this is true but it's no longer 2015 (when the X1 was bleeding edge) or 2017 (when the Switch RRP was set). You can get more performance per W and per $ than the Switch provides.

Also the Steam Deck isn't proof a higher spec isn't achievable. Or that you have to compromise on form/price to get it. The Steam Deck is proof of how far things have moved in the last 5 years. It's what, ~5X the Switch spec for a couple of hundred more? And with a battery life in the same ballpark as the launch Switch.

Now I'm not saying Nintendo should go that far but still there's a lot of room. Double the RAM, 3X raw horsepower, newer and more efficient SoC. They could do that at a similar price to the OLED model

@CactusMan I'm hopeful that the Switch's library will be compatible with the Switch's successor. But I'm proceeding with caution by assuming it won't be. Nintendo is a corporation like any other. Profit takes precedence over customer satisfaction.

@skywake The Steam Deck indeed has about 5x more processing power than the Switch by most metrics, but it only achieves that by drawing extra electrical power. Figures released so far suggest that it draws about 20W, versus about 8W for an original 2017 Switch in handheld mode, or 11W docked. It gets a similar battery life only because it has a similarly proportioned battery of around 40Wh versus 16Wh for the Switch. The increase in performance-per-watt terms is, as such, somewhat less impressive than the overall performance gap.

Secondly, the Switch has already benefited from improvements of technology in the X1+ chip. That's about 40% more efficient than the X1 in the original Switch allows the 2019 revision to run cooler and for longer. There would perhaps be an opportunity for further gains from another die-shrink, but probably nowhere near as much; the original process the X1 was built on just turned out to be a bit of a dead end.

Thirdly, the Steam Deck is built using an AMD SoC and they're able to offer ones built on a considerably more competitive process than anything comparable that Nvidia have been making. Nintendo pretty much have to go with Nvidia if they want backwards compatibility too because the Switch has nothing like the level of hardware abstraction that a PC does.

As has often been said, Nvidia have mostly been pitching at the automotive market with theirs where power efficiency isn't quite such a big deal as with mobile devices. They can't currently offer anything hugely better than the X1+ right now without drawing a lot more power. I'd think that they were to get something out this year it'd almost certainly have to be a customized version of the Xavier SoC. That's built on an only marginally more efficient 12nm process than the X1+ but at least there'd be potential gains from the architectural improvements in the GPU, including DLSS. Maybe that's what they're doing and it's just not ready yet? I'm not holding my breath.

Holding on for another year or so makes things much more interesting though, as Nvidia moving to the same 7nm process that AMD are using with Orin. Orin itself isn't going in the Switch; it's a 65W beast that's, again, mainly for the automotive market. Rather, Nintendo would need a custom variant with less cores and lower clocks. It might match the Steam Deck on efficiency, but probably won't come near it in raw performance. As ever, whether that's what they're doing or not, and when it might hit the market if they are is still speculation.

TL;DR - Technology moves on, but not always as fast as you'd like and it's by steps rather than a smoothe curve.

@Magician Why would you proceed with caution when every console Nintendo has made in the last 15 years has played the previous gen's games? Weird.

@Matt_Barber
A few counter points. Firstly on those numbers the Switch draws about 2.5X less power in portable mode than the Steam Deck. So the Steam Deck is significantly more power efficient given it's significantly more than 2.5X the raw spec. Also ARM is generally more power efficient than x86 and there are overheads Valve is going to have to deal with, being a PC, that Nintendo doesn't have to worry about.

Secondly, the Orin SoC you're talking about that has a 65W TDP is a bit of a monster. There isn't much detail about it but looking at the supposed core count and the process? It's probably a good 3-4X above the Steam Deck. That SoC doesn't really make much sense for a consumer device outside of maybe a non-portable gaming console or some kind of ARM based gaming laptop. But there's no reason why they couldn't drop the core-config, drop the clock and drop features of that SoC. Case and point, Jetson Nano exists and is effectively a scaled down X1 SoC

I don't see any reason why Nintendo couldn't do some kind of higher spec Switch revision. Especially if we're talking a year or two from now.

@GrailUK

Because that backwards compatibility was made possible by Nintendo building the old hardware into the newer hardware. The GC was built into the Wii, the Wii was built into the Wii U, the DS was built into the 3DS, etc. But if the reports of Tegra X1 production ending are true, then all games available on Switch will have to be recoded in order to function on the Switch successor's new SoC. And that effort won't be free.

As we see with all the ports from Wii U to the Switch, chances are good we'll have to purchase our games all over again.

@Magician Then (respectfully) I totally disagree with your pessimism. Mr Iwata addressed taking games with you accross generations and catagorically said they are starting again with Switch. That man had vision and a 20 year partnership with NVidia would have shared it. It's something they think is important (to the point of slapping in old hardware.) But it sounds like integrating Switch into their next console will be much simpler than Wii U to Switch.