Wow. Lot to cover huh?
A three month hardware delay doesn't suddenly invent games that can be launched to fill in the gap. We don't know if this delay is real. We don't know when this delay, if real, was decided on.
But if Nintendo had a fairly recent schedule change, wouldn't you expect them to have to s t r e t c h out the remaining Switch 1 releases to cover a longer period? If their original intent was to have Switch 2 + Big Launch Title as the holiday package, and now they delay to next year, wouldn't you expect them to take the biggest, last Switch 1 game in the hopper, and pull it out of Summer and push it into the Holiday?
Let's pretend we're in the middle of the Switch lifecycle, and we're in the runup to a Generic February Direct. Let us assume that Nintendo doesn't have any big hitters coming soon, and the release schedule is looking thin. What basically every game company does in those cases, is start announcing software early, with CGI trailers and vague dates, as a way to paper over the lack of announcements.
But in a world with delayed hardware, all the
paper launch marketing tactics aren't available to you, because all the games 2 years out are tied to your Switch 2 marketing. Hell, if they're exclusives, you certainly don't want to be advertising games that can't be played on the only hardware customers know about
I have no idea what, if anything is happening at Nintendo. I'm just saying, any recent delay of the NG launch, if it was happening, only makes the Partner Direct make more sense, not less. Nintendo has to stretch out the existing calendar.
A 4 month delay doesn't suddenly age a product intended for a 7 year life cycle. It will not impact pricing (which, historically, Nintendo tries to not change over the course of a generation).
How "dated" hardware is depends on what comes after it's launch. T239 will still be the most advanced GPU design in a handheld if it launched in 2025, because right now, Nvidia's GPU designs are still light-years beyond their competitors. And the last three Nvidia micro-arches have all been pretty small refinements of the same design. Radical changes aren't happening in that space. In that sense, while the "on paper" date of T239's GPU design might be slightly over that of TX1's by launch time, it is closer to the state-of-the-art than TX1 was, which was still the most advanced (if not most
powerful) console GPU on the market.
Will the next Nvidia GPU radically change up the core of their design? And if so, is that radical change successful? Does it lead to new programming models that the industry adopts? We can only guess, and guess even less about the generations after that. Will AMD catch up, or Intel disrupt the market? Who knows. These things will determine how rapidly T239 ages, not the ticking of the clock.
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