There are only so many games Nintendo can realistically have lineup up and prepared for release. The Wii U was such a flop that it allowed them to recycle the bulk of Wii U's first party titles and release them on Switch. Nintendo did have a lot of brand new titles prepared for Switch, but if you were to remove all the Wii U ports, the release schedule would not have been nearly as consistent. Is it possible or reasonable to think that Nintendo can have a dozen first party games lined up for the first year on the market? I'm doubtful that they can. I also do not think they really need to have the same pacing they did with Switch in order for it to be successful. Third parties will be on board from the start this time, and while I do still believe that it is up to Nintendo to make sure the system gets off to a great start, it will really only take a few high profile games to make that happen. Secure a few high profile third party games for the first year, something like Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption 2 would be perfect. The flood of third party ports is basically certainty at this point. Switch has been a smash success and third parties wont be playing the wait and see game this time.
Assuming Nintendo was planning for a 2024 release and has decided to push that back to March 2025, we are looking at a roughly six month delay. Sort of inconsequential when we consider games generally take many years to develop, but it does move up their entire lineup of games being developed by six months. Perhaps Nintendo has six to ten games currently in development for SNG all at various stages of development. If they were to launch the system in 2024, only five of them would be done and ready to ship within the first eighteen months on the market, requiring them to space them out accordingly. By releasing six months later than originally planned, these same five titles will all release within twelve months of launch. Basically this allows them to create a stacked condensed lineup of big hitters in the first year on the market.
Another possibility is that Nintendo sees an opportunity to squeeze every last drop out of the Switch before moving on to the successor and because Switch has still been selling well, they feel confident they can do this without any negative consequences for the new hardware. Regardless if SNG launches in late 2024 or in early 2025, this will not have a meaningful impact on the success of that new platform.
There's also COVID to unfortunately factor in, for a game launching in fall 2024, these days it probably would have to have begun development around 2020/2021, which is smack dab in the middle of offices being shut down.
That probably unfortunately played a role as Nintendo didn't have their dev teams in their offices working how they normally would work and for a critical generational leap, that probably didn't help at all. The early stages of Switch 2 software development was likely impacted and given Nintendo was probably already looking at some time period to adjust to a big jump in performance, all of that could easily have put them behind 8-12+ months.
Last edited: