Nintendo’s next console revealed by March 2025

Nintendo announced on Tuesday that information on the console that will succeed the Switch, which is more than seven years old, will be communicated by the end of March 2025.

We will make an announcement regarding the successor console to Nintendo Switch this fiscal yearwhich ends on March 31, 2025, wrote its president Shuntaro Furukawa on X.

However, he tempered expectations by adding that communication on the next Nintendo games, in June, would not no mention of the new console.

The ball of rumors – never confirmed by Nintendo – which have been building pressure around the console which will replace the Switch for several years now had given way to investor disappointment in mid-February. Several media outlets have claimed that the launch, hoped for this year, could be postponed until 2025.

Decline in view of Nintendo’s turnover

The Nintendo title, which has been soaring since the beginning of January in the face of expectations of a Switch2 this year, has fallen 13% since this press information was published.

The annual objectives announced Tuesday by the group based in Kyoto, Japan, confirm in detail that the future console will have only a small effect on its results in 2024 and 2025. Nintendo thus only forecasts a net profit of 300 billion of yen (2.7 billion Canadian dollars), which would be a fall of almost 40% year-on-year.

It also expects a 20% decline in its turnover over this period.

A console that is still popular

Defying all predictions of a difficult end of life, the current Switch console, released in March 2017, has now sold more than 141 million copies, according to what Nintendo announced on Tuesday. It is the third best-selling console in the history of video games behind Sony’s PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo DS.

According to analyst Serkan Toto from Kantan Games, the Switch can exceed her two competitors to take the first step of the podium, especially if Nintendo continues to sell it for a while after release of the new console, he estimated on X.

Nintendo sold 15.7 million copies of the Switch last year, in line with its objective, and plans to sell an additional 13.5 million in 2024 and 2025.

Sales of this console reached their peak in 2020, when a large number of countries implemented confinements linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, encouraging many people to equip themselves with video games to get through this period.

But revenues had since been on a declining trend, even though the release of several big, highly anticipated games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomand the effects of the box office success of the Mario film, helped in 2023 and 2024 to cushion the inevitable fall in sales.

Record profit for Nintendo

Helped by the resistance of its aging machine and by the fall of the yen which is boosting its sales abroad, Nintendo announced Tuesday a record net profit for the financial year ended at the end of March (490.6 billion yen, or 4.3 billion Canadian dollars, up 13.4% year-on-year), and sales up 4.4%.

Much less predictable than its competitors Sony and Microsoft for its new consoles, Nintendo generally offers with each new release an innovation beyond raw power, and this time again, the secret is well kept.

Many analysts believe, however, that moving away from the hybrid model of the Switch, which allows the console to be used portablely or connected to a television, would be a considerable risk for the Japanese group.

Accustomed to Russian mountainsNintendo had thus in the past followed the triumph of the Wii console released in 2006 (101.63 million copies sold) with the resounding failure of the Wii U six years later (only 13.56 million copies sold ).