Nintendo Switch 2 will be very different if you listen to the hint from Miyamoto

A reader thinks Nintendo may have given away more than people realise when it comes to the next console after the Nintendo Switch.

Considering the Nintendo Switch is coming up to its sixth anniversary it’s obvious that a successor must be well underway, no matter how much Nintendo tries to play down that eventuality. They’ve said the Switch is meant to last 10 years but that doesn’t mean they’re going to wait until March 2027 and only release their new console then. It’s perfectly normal for consoles to continue to be sold for a year or two after their replacement is released and often more than that for Nintendo ones.

It’s pointless trying to predict a release date – that’s not what I’m trying to write about – but I would be relatively surprised if Nintendo didn’t at least start to hint about it officially next year. Best case scenario, I think the theory about Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom being the last big budget Switch-only game is fairly likely and we may hear about the console shortly after its release.

Nintendo were in a tricky situation with the Switch 2, or whatever it ends up being called, because they’re out of synch with Xbox and PlayStation, given the failure of Wii U, and if the pandemic hadn’t happened they would’ve ended up releasing it halfway through the current generation, and probably only a year or two before there started to be talk about the PlayStation 6. That’s not going to happen for a long, long time now though – at least five years – which gives Nintendo a chance to catch up.

Logically, there’s no way Nintendo isn’t already working on new hardware, but they pretty much confirmed as much recently when Miyamoto was talking about backwards compatibility and digital accounts (plus a Pokemon developer saying they’re working on next gen hardware). It was all very vague, as you’d expect, but he did come out with this one very interesting sentence: