Switch 2 release probably not until 2025: Nintendo's share price slips

When will the new Switch console be released? There has been a lot of speculation and predictions about this in the past. Now the shares of the manufacturer Nintendo are also suffering. They already began to weaken at the weekend and yesterday, Monday, the share price plummeted. Even today, the shares of the video game giant from Japan have not yet recovered. In the past few days, it has lost more than eight per cent in value.

What happened? Almost seven years after the release of Nintendo's successful Switch games console, rumours and assumptions about an imminent successor - the Switch 2 - began to spread last year. However, there was no official confirmation or announcement from Nintendo. On the contrary: in November 2023, Shuntarō Furukawa, President of Nintendo, described the rumours about the Switch 2 as "not accurate". Nevertheless, expectations of a probable release of the Switch 2 later in 2024 have persisted in the industry.

The specifications of the new console have also only been the subject of speculation. My colleague Domi summarised everything that is known so far a few weeks ago:

Rumours of a postponed release until next year

There was a twist at the weekend: News of a postponed release of the console to 2025 spread quickly. However, there seems to be some truth to the rumours: they are based on talks that Nintendo is said to have recently held with various game developers. According to the rumours, Nintendo has informed the studios that the console will no longer be on the market in 2024. Several magazines reported on this independently of each other.

Nintendo may comment in more detail on the plans for a Switch 2 in March: That's when the next quarterly figures will be announced.

The competition never sleeps

The Switch already had significantly weaker hardware than the Playstation 4/5 and the Xbox when it was released in 2017. This makes it increasingly difficult to optimise current games when porting them to the Switch's lower performance.

At the same time, the competition is fuelling high expectations: A few days ago, Microsoft announced a new next-gen console with significantly higher performance as well as further "hardware surprises".

For the Playstation 5, whose sales are weakening according to new data, a Pro version is expected this year, which should have significantly better performance.