Nintendo, notoriously secretive, has so far said nothing — or almost nothing — on the record about its next game console. As Nintendo Switch approaches its seventh birthday in March 2024, questions about how much longer it will last are natural: Seven years is a typical lifespan for a console generation, Switch sales are falling fast, and the technology powering the console is showing its age. But Nintendo has flatly refused to engage with those questions.
Behind the scenes, however, Nintendo is gearing up for the release of its new machine, briefing its partners, and releasing development kits. Information has started to leak, and a picture of what form the console will take has begun to emerge, as well as when we can expect to hear about it and when we can expect to buy one.
It’s no surprise that Nintendo is treading carefully. The Switch has been an enormous success — it’s the third-best-selling console of all time, behind only PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s own DS handheld — which presents both a big opportunity and a big risk. Historically, Nintendo has struggled to follow its most popular formats: Wii and DS were followed by the flop of Wii U and the relative disappointment (in sales terms) of 3DS. Nintendo’s usual insistence on hardware innovation has proven as likely to alienate its audience as to find a new one. Will Nintendo break with its own tradition and follow the Switch with a more powerful take on the same formula, or will it try something different?
What is the latest Switch 2 news?
Reports sourced from peripheral and accessory manufacturers suggest the Switch 2 will feature Joy-Cons that attach to the console magnetically, and have additional buttons not featured on the original Joy-Cons. Despite this, the console will be fully backward-compatible with Switch games and even some hardware, including physical game cartridges and existing controllers. Read our full report.
Will Nintendo’s next-gen console be called Switch 2?
Regarding its name, the answer is that we don’t know. It’s worth noting that Nintendo has never before named its consoles in numerical sequence, even when they were direct follow-ups to a previous generation, such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo 3DS. Super Nintendo Switch (or Super Switch!) has a certain ring to it, if you ask us. But for now, “Switch 2” is a serviceable shorthand, and what we’ll use in this article.
Will Switch 2 be a hybrid handheld console, like Switch?
The answer here appears to be yes. Reporting by VGC, citing multiple sources after dev kits arrived at partner studios, said that the console “would be able to be used in portable mode, similar to the Nintendo Switch.” This was later corroborated by Nikkei.
Reporting suggests the console will feature detachable Joy-Con controllers like the Switch, this time with a magnetic attachment system, plus a dock similar to the original Switch’s. There’s no world on whether it will have a handheld-only variant like the Switch Lite. But early signs are that Nintendo is keen to follow closely in the footsteps of the 130-million-plus-selling Switch.
It might be a bit bigger, though. A 2024 report from a Japanese analyst suggests the console will have an 8-inch screen, compared to the original Switch’s 6.2 inches and the Switch OLED model’s 7 inches.
What is Switch 2’s release date?
Nintendo hasn’t officially indicated when the Switch 2 will be released, but we have a few clues.
Originally, multiple sources reported that the console was planned to debut in the second half of 2024. However, it now appears that Nintendo is targeting a March 2025 release date.
Brazilian games journalist Pedro Henrique Lutti Lippe originally broke the news of the slip to 2025, saying that multiple sources said they were working on games that are set to launch alongside the Switch 2. Both Eurogamer and VGC heard similar claims from their sources. Nikkei then reported Nintendo was targeting March 2025 in an effort to avoid hardware shortages and ensure a strong lineup of games — but noted a slip beyond March was still possible.
While this is later than we previously expected, it fits in with an October 2023 interview with Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, who reiterated that the company would remain focused on Switch until the end of Nintendo’s current fiscal year in March 2024, and added that it would continue to support Switch with new titles in the following fiscal year. The shift from “focus” to “support” for the Switch implies that a new console will launch in Nintendo’s next fiscal year — so, between April 2024 and March 2025.
This also lines up with what we know about declining Switch sales, the stage Nintendo is at in the development of the console, and the release schedule for Switch games. Nintendo previously ruled out releasing a new console before the end of March 2024, and it now has Switch games scheduled through summer 2024; the latest release on the current schedule is Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, which has been given a summer 2024 slot. (It’s also worth noting that the recently announced remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door doesn’t have a more precise release date than “2024.”)
This does mean the Switch 2 will miss the 2024 holiday season, but it’ll give the company more time to stockpile some first-party titles, according to VGC sources.
Will Switch 2 be backward-compatible?
This is the big question, with many users hoping — or outright expecting — to carry forward their game libraries to Nintendo’s next console, as has become the norm with the latest generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The answer remains unknown, and it’s not easy to predict, either.
VGC’s report said that the backward compatibility of the machine “remains unclear.” Some third-party publishers were said to be worried about the potential impact on sales of next-gen titles if the machine is backward-compatible. For its part, Nintendo has (in a rare on-the-record comment) said it hopes to bring Switch users over to the new platform with their Nintendo accounts; if the Nintendo account system persists, that would in theory make it easy for users to access previous purchases. But that’s not the same thing as the console being technically capable of it.
However, later reports, sourced from peripheral manufacturers, suggest that the Switch 2 will be backward compatible with Switch games — including physical cartridges — and accessories, including the Pro Controller and Joy-Cons.
Nintendo has a decent, if not flawless, record for supporting backward compatibility. The Wii played GameCube games, and the Wii U played Wii games; the Game Boy Advance was backward-compatible with the Game Boy, and the 3DS with the DS. But the Switch, with its new game cartridge format, enforced a clean break with the past, and Nintendo has made a mint from rereleasing Wii U games on the machine, particularly the 55-million-selling Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
On balance, as long as the machine uses the same format for physical releases (see below), Nintendo’s record suggests that it will make the Switch 2 backward-compatible. However, there remain technical hurdles to implementing backward compatibility, and much will depend on the chip architecture Nintendo has chosen for the Switch 2, which is not currently known.
Will Switch 2 be digital-only, or will games be sold on cartridge (or disc)?
Of all the console manufacturers, Nintendo’s ties to the retail industry are perhaps the strongest — stronger even than Sony’s — so Nintendo is extremely unlikely to go digital-only for the Switch 2, even if this would seem to make sense for a portable machine.
Indeed, VGC’s report included the detail that the new console will have a cartridge slot for physical releases. This is as close to a dead cert as we can get with the Switch 2 — and it also happens to support the machine having the same or similar form factor as the Switch, as well as increasing the likelihood of backward compatibility.
How powerful will Switch 2 be? Will it be able to play new AAA games?
Thanks to Microsoft’s legal battles over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and reports of demos given by Nintendo to partners at Gamescom, we are beginning to get a sense of how capable the Switch 2’s hardware will be.
Internal emails released as part of the FTC v. Microsoft case revealed that Activision executives met with Nintendo in December 2022 to discuss the console, and came away with the impression that performance would be close to “Gen8 platforms” — in other words, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. (Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick later said that he had not seen tech specs for the machine, however.)
If anything, the “Gen8” comparison sounds as though it might undersell the Switch 2’s capabilities. According to Eurogamer’s and VGC’s reporting on the behind-closed-doors Gamescom demos, Nintendo showed hardware targeting the specs of the console running The Matrix Awakens’ Unreal Engine 5 tech demo with ray tracing enabled and “visuals comparable to Sony’s and Microsoft’s current-gen consoles.”
This doesn’t mean that the Switch 2 will be as powerful as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Instead, Nintendo is likely using clever techniques to reduce the demand on a less powerful graphics processor. VGC reported that the demo ran using Nvidia’s advanced DLSS upscaling technology, which uses AI to upscale the resolution of the image, making it easier for developers to optimize performance and visuals on weaker hardware by lowering the internal resolution settings.
Still, the mention of Unreal Engine 5 — which is establishing itself as the industry standard engine, targeting current console hardware — along with DLSS and ray tracing suggests that Nintendo is keen to get closer to PS5 and Xbox Series X in terms of performance, and perhaps make it more feasible for developers to port their home console releases on the Switch 2. Reporting by Reuters and Digital Foundry suggests the console will use a custom Nvidia chip that will be capable of both ray-tracing and DLSS.
Also at Gamescom, a special, improved version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was shown, running at higher resolution and frame rate than it does on Switch.
The Switch 2 will feature one tech downgrade, however: Reportedly, the console will feature an LCD screen, unlike the OLED screen seen in the current top-of-the-range Switch model, as a cost-cutting measure.
What games will be available for Switch 2?
Speaking of the enhanced Breath of the Wild demo, sources were keen to point out that there was no suggestion that an enhanced version of the full game would become a commercial product — although it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if it did.
The foremost candidate for a Switch 2 launch game is probably Metroid Prime 4. Of the previously announced in-house Nintendo games, this is the only one without a suggestion of a release date, and Nintendo has been very quiet about it of late. Given that, a release before the second half of 2024 seems unlikely. Perhaps Nintendo will make it a cross-gen release for the Switch and its successor, as it did with Breath of the Wild for Wii U/Switch, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for GameCube/Wii.
Other than Metroid Prime 4, there are two glaring gaps in Nintendo’s lineup: a new Mario Kart, and a 3D Super Mario game. There hasn’t been an all-new Mario Kart in over nine years, and aside from making add-ons for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the Mario Kart development team has been quiet since the release of Arms in 2017. Deluxe has sold so consistently over the Switch’s lifetime that Nintendo hasn’t had an incentive to release a sequel, but a new platform would seem to present the perfect opportunity for Mario Kart 9.
Similarly, there hasn’t been a new 3D Mario game since 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey. It’s a given that there will be one on Nintendo’s next platform; the only question is when. Odyssey, like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, appeared during the first year of the Switch’s life; perhaps we can expect a repeat of that for the Switch 2.
Polygon will continue to update this story as new details develop.