The Japanese Nintendo announced Tuesday that information concerning the highly anticipated successor to its Switch console, more than seven years old, will be communicated by the end of March 2025, while delivering new extremely cautious financial forecasts.
“We will make an announcement regarding the successor to the Nintendo Switch during this fiscal year”, which ends on March 31, 2025, wrote on X its president Shuntaro Furukawa.
However, he tempered expectations by adding that communication on upcoming Nintendo games in June would make “no mention” of the new console.
The ball of rumors – never confirmed by Nintendo – which have been building pressure around the successor to the Switch for several years now had given way to the disappointment of investors in mid-February when several media outlets claimed that the launch, hoped for this year, could be postponed to 2025.
Nintendo shares, which have been soaring since the beginning of January in the face of expectations for a “Switch 2” this year, had fallen 13% since the publication of this press information.
Sales of the Switch, released in March 2017, reached their peak in 2020, when a large number of countries implemented lockdowns in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, encouraging many consumers to equip themselves with games video to get through this period.
But revenues have since been on a declining trend, even if the release of several big, highly anticipated games like “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”, and the effects of the box office success of the film “Mario”, have contributed in 2023/24 to cushion the inevitable fall in sales.
Nintendo announced on Tuesday a record net profit for its past financial year which ended at the end of March (490.6 billion yen, or 2.9 billion euros, up 13.4% over one year), helped by the fall of the yen which boosts its sales abroad.
Its annual operating profit increased by 4.9% to 528.9 billion yen and its sales by 4.4% to 1,671.9 billion yen (10 billion euros).
For 2024/25, however, Nintendo expects a drop of almost 40% in its net profit, and a decline of 20% in its turnover.
