Nintendo has reconfirmed that the Switch successor will be revealed by the end of March 2025, when its current financial year concludes. Company president Shuntaro Furukawa made the announcement during an online press conference on Tuesday following the publication of Nintendo’s latest earning results, saying that announcement plans for the Switch successor have not changed.
Analysts are predicting that Nintendo won’t make an announcement this year, as doing so could have an impact on sales leading into the 2024 holiday season. “Making an announcement this year has gotten quite difficult,” Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said to Reuters. “You would not want to divert attention to an upcoming console in the middle of the critical year-end shopping season.”
Meanwhile, Nintendo has lowered its Switch hardware sales forecast down from 13.5 million to 12.5 million for the rest of the fiscal year. “For a platform that is in its eighth year in the market, both hardware and software enjoy stable demand and brisk sales,” Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said (via VGC).
Overall, Nintendo has reported a 34% decrease in net sales, while hardware and software sales have fallen by 31% and 27.6%, respectively. It’s worth noting that Nintendo had a strong 2023, as last year the company released The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros Movie was a blockbuster hit that helped push Nintendo’s stock higher.
September’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom sold 2.58 million copies, while other recent releases like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door sold 1.94 million copies and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD sold 1.57 million units.
Lifetime sales for Switch hardware–OLED, standard, and Lite models–have now passed 146 million units in total, while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continues to be Nintendo’s best-selling game of all time, as it has reached 64.27 million lifetime sales.