If you are one of the people who was waiting for the successor to the Nintendo Switch within the next year, as some rumors anticipated, you better moderate your expectations. According to Bloombergthose in Kyoto are fully confident that they can extend the life of their current hardware, largely because the production process has improved significantly.
Today, according to the report, the company is capable of distributing 21 million units of the Nintendo Switch for the next fiscal year, which will begin in March 2023.
When a video game console manufacturer makes these kinds of moves on its production line, it is highly unlikely that it will introduce a new generation. Why? Because the announcement of renewed hardware would steal interest from the product that is still being marketed.
Therefore, we can intuit that, at least for the next 14 months, there will be no official information regarding the successor to the Nintendo Switch.
The shortage of components is behind
One of the reasons why Nintendo increased production of the Switch, always according to Bloomberg information, is because the availability of components has stabilized. A couple of years ago, we were talking about how the shortage of chips, caused mainly by the pandemic, had slowed down the mass production of many technological products.
The Japanese company itself, in November 2021, acknowledged that the shortage had hit the production of the Nintendo Switch. Specifically, they manufactured 20% fewer units than expected. In addition, they warned that consumers would likely have a hard time finding the console around Christmas time.
In August 2022, they announced an unprecedented situation in the life cycle of the Nintendo Switch: sales of the console did not meet expectations. But not because the market has lost interest in their proposal, but because they could not satisfy the enormous demand.
However, the landscape has changed significantly in the last six months. Little by little, the Asian production line is stabilizing, and the technology companies are recovering the production rate lost in the pandemic. Just a few weeks ago, Sony said that the PS5 shortage is finally over. Certainly, in many countries it is already much easier to find it at its official suggested price.
Despite everything, the successor to the Nintendo Switch is on the way
The above report does not mean, of course, that Nintendo is not developing a next-generation console. In fact, this week, Nikkei announced that the big N was negotiating with its suppliers to make the successor to the Nintendo Switch a reality. They added that, at best, it will be available until the end of 2024.
Shuntaro Furukawa, CEO of Nintendo, was questioned about the existence of new hardware. However, the manager limited himself to saying (via The Gamer): “We want to provide entertainment that is different from the rest.” In other words, the company maintains its vision of trying to break away from the competition by introducing an innovative gaming experience.
Of course, if we stick to recent reports on the characteristics of the successor to the Nintendo Switch, it seems that we will see a somewhat continuous proposal. In Digital Foundry they echoed that the Nintendo Switch Pro was cancelled, but that a part of the hardware will be present in a next-generation console.
“I think at some point, internally from what I’ve been able to talk to some developers, some kind of mid-gen or update to the Switch was in the works. But it looks like that’s not going to happen anymore,” said John Linneman.
In the past it was said that the Nintendo Switch Pro would bet on a 4K resolution, at least while it was connected to the television. Also, that it will have support for DLSS, NVIDIA’s upscaling technology.