Although Nintendo’s successor to the Switch console has widely been expected to hit shelves this year, new reports from multiple outlets – and citing multiple sources – have claimed that the Switch 2 (or whatever it’ll eventually be called) has since slipped into an early 2025 release instead.
Reports first began from Brazilian games journalist Pedro Henrique Lutti Lippe, who said in a video that five separate sources informed him of an internal change to launch the next Nintendo console in Q1 2025 and that Nintendo was preparing games to target that same period.
VGC then piled on to those claims to say that numerous sources have told it the console was originally targeting a 2024 launch but that Nintendo has since briefed third-party gaming companies on an internal delay to the first quarter of 2025. A “publishing source” reportedly told the outlet that the delay was in order to prepare a stronger line-up of first-party software for the console.
And further adding to the list, Eurogamer has also jumped in to corroborate the story, saying “The console’s launch moving into early next year – but still within the coming financial year – is designed to ensure Switch 2’s launch line-up features as many titles as possible, Eurogamer understands.”
Nintendo’s upcoming fiscal year runs from April 2024 through to March 2025, so if these new whispers hold any validity we may very well see a direct repeat of the original Switch’s arrival, which was announced in late 2016 and then launched in March 2017.
Previous rumours have suggested that Nintendo’s next machine will sport an 8″ LCD display, rock a custom NVIDIA chipset and feature backwards compatibility with original Nintendo Switch games both digitally and via physical carts.
Of course, without any official word from Nintendo themselves we really don’t know anything of substance about what its future hardware plans are.
The closest we’ve come to a genuine update on the hardware front is a quote from Nintendo of America’s president, Doug Bowser, saying, “Our goal is to minimise the dip you typically see in the last year of one cycle and the beginning of another. I can’t speak to the possible features of a new platform, but the Nintendo Account is a strong basis for having that communication as we make the transition.”
