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While the Wii U had a bounty of great first party games, it wasn’t exactly the best time for Nintendo. The system failed to find an audience pretty much from day one, and this forced Nintendo’s hand in a follow-up platforms.

The Wii U’s failings led to Nintendo announcing the codename NX, hardware that would eventually be revealed as the Switch. The NX was announced to the public roughly two years before it would see release. Now fans are wondering if we’ll see a similar approach to whatever hardware follows the Switch.

In a Nintendo investor Q&A, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa was asked if there will be another 2-year gap between Switch successor announcement and release. Furukawa’s response is intentionally vague, but it does seem like the NX-to-Switch announcement timing was a special circumstance.

You can see a translation of Furukawa’s comments below, as provided by VGC and Robert Sephazon.

“This announcement coincided with our partnership with DeNA Co., Ltd. for the development of games for smart phones and support for the new Nintendo Account system.

At that time, as we were venturing into the mobile business, we felt it was important to reassure our audience that Nintendo’s primary focus remained on our dedicated game console business. This is why the timing of the Nintendo Switch announcement was a unique situation.

Moving forward, our strategy is to disclose information about our products, including both hardware and software, at the most suitable times to reach our broad customer base.”

[Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa]

Of course, we’ve known for awhile now that Nintendo has been toiling away on the Switch’s successor. Now, as to when we actually hear the first details of what that system will be, your guess is as good as ours.

UPDATE - This post has been updated with the official translation of Nintendo’s statement, which you can see in full below.

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Comments (7)

tendonin

11M ago

Aside from the aforementioned NX namedrop and some rumors, the Switch basically went from no official info to a proper hardware reveal in the span of a YouTube video 5 months before launch. Safe to say the trade show reveals of the 2000's and before are long gone. With that in mind, the current lack of info doesn't mean much one way or the other.

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d_says_hi

11M ago

Didn't they do a direct in January and released the Switch in March?


sinfield99

11M ago

The reveal trailer came out in the October before I believe.

I'd love for them to tease a project name...gets everyone talking after the release of TotK! ☺️


tendonin

11M ago

@d_says_hi

Right, it was the NX tease in early 2015, the initial reveal in October 2016, then a special Direct/media event in January before the launch in March.


lionk

11M ago

I think I'd like a 3DSwitch, it doesn't have to be like a PS6 or XboxNext.


Switch / NX was a paradigm shift for Nintendo. I can imagine they were nervous as hell it would all pay off.


vinlauria

11M ago

That March 2015 conference was a mistake. It killed any interest in the Wii U dead just as the system was finally starting to pick up momentum after a stellar 2014, and further pressured Nintendo to rush Switch out the door as soon as possible, leading to its release in its current form as faulty, underpowered hardware... and no, I don't care that it still sold well, because it's still a worse-off product for what happened and led to its predecessor getting utterly shafted. All because shareholders were demanding Nintendo go mobile.

I often wonder how much better off we'd be had Nintendo not caved to those demands, especially since Nintendo's mobile efforts have been largely disparaged anyway. It traded away the future of something with actual potential and the quality of the current platform all for an announcement of entry into an oversaturated market via a lineup of subpar products. It didn't even pay off for them; it'd crippled them for years.

Switch would have been a success either way - possibly an even bigger one than it has been - had they just stayed course rather than gave in to ignoramuses. After all, it's not like they were losing money.

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