Game News Can the Nintendo Switch last until 2027?
Recently, the president of Nintendo announced that the Nintendo Switch was only halfway through its life cycle. Given its impressive success, can we expect to play on Nintendo’s hybrid console for another five years?
Summary
- A strategy to prolong success over time
- Identical hardware for ten years?
Like some kind of prophecy, Nintendo consoles seem to live up to the rule that success always skips a generation. After the Gamecube, which had trouble finding its audience despite its cult aura today, the Wii has had worldwide success to the point of tickling sales of the PS2, which remains the best-selling console of all time. . Then came the Wii U, which struggled to establish itself in homes despite its interesting proto-hybrid proposal. Ultimately, Nintendo ended up learning from the failure of its console to release the Switch, which takes up the ideas of the Wii U, going even further in its proposal to make it a completely hybrid console.allowing you to play both on a screen and in portable mode anywhere without connection constraints.
A strategy to prolong success over time
The rest, you surely know it: the Nintendo Switch is a huge hit, racking up 103.54 million copies sold as of December 31, 2021. These figures give it the fifth place of the best-selling consoles of all time, ahead of the PlayStation (102.4 million) but especially the Wii (101.63 million), which makes it the Nintendo home console the most sold all the time. However, it still has some way to go to catch up with the sales of the manufacturer’s portable consoles such as the Game Boy (118.69 million) or the Nintendo DS (154.02 million). On the occasion of the publication of its financial statement last February, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said the Nintendo Switch was only halfway through its life cycle. And since the console was released in March 2017, which is five years ago, that brings us to 2027.
Behind this statement, Nintendo therefore seems to want to surf as long as possible on the success of the Switch. This is also felt through their games, starting with the console’s best-selling title Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. While rumors evoked a Mario Kart 9 (or even 10 if we consider that Mario Kart Tour is the ninth episode), Nintendo has finally announced that MK8D will receive new circuits through the “Additional Circuits Pass”. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will thus see its number of races double, going from 48 to 96 races, through six waves of content spread out until the end of 2023. A way to regularly release new content to constantly revive players’ interest in a game that dates back to 2014 in its original version on Wii U. A fairly rare process for Nintendo since the Switch does not have so many service games compared to its rivals, the PS5 and the Xbox Series, except of course Fortnite and some good exceptions like Warframe.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe unveils its Additional Tracks Pass!
Beyond regularly updating its greatest hits, Above all, Nintendo will have to regularly supply its console with new titles if it wants to extend its life cycle in the long term.. As usual for several generations of consoles already, the manufacturer relies above all on its own productions to sell its consoles rather than on games from third-party publishers. If we have been able to see in recent years large cartridges like Monster Hunter Rise or other exclusives from Square Enix (Bravely Default II, Octopath Traveler…) and Atlus (Shin Megami Tensei V), there are almost exclusively Nintendo games in the ranking of the console’s best-selling titles.
For this reason, the Japanese manufacturer is planning big exclusives for 2022, with The Legend of Zelda : Breath of the Wild 2, Pokemon Scarlet/Purple, Bayonetta 3 or Splatoon 3, but it will need new announcements for the next five years to come. At this level, rumors are rife between a new Mario 3D, Fire Emblem or Donkey Kong Country to power the console in the years to come. And then, there are still projects announced for a long time and of which we still have no news, like the mysterious Metroid Prime 4. In all cases, Nintendo remains the main architect of its success since its productions are the main driver of the popularity of its consoles.
Identical hardware for ten years?
If Nintendo wants to extend the success of the Switch like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, another question will quickly arise: that of hardware. While the specter of a more powerful Switch model (called for convenience Switch Pro in reference to the PS4 Pro) came back regularly last year, it must be recognized that the rumors have been less and less pressing since then. the release of the Switch Model OLED. As a reminder, this is a model just as powerful as the basic model, but which has as its main argument an OLED screen of better quality than the LCD of the original version. If we know that Nintendo has abandoned the race for technology since the Wii to turn to a family offer, it is difficult to say if the Japanese manufacturer could decide to stay on the same hardware for a whole decade..
Until now, Nintendo has never offered a more powerful model of a home console like a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. However, we’ve seen a few examples in the past on the handheld side, at image of the Nintendo 3DS had been entitled to the New Nintendo 3DS. On this occasion, Nintendo had tried to offer games exclusively for this type of model, such as Xenoblade Chronicles and Fire Emblem Warriors. However, this kind of decision does not seem to have been convincing since they are the only two games which have been entitled to this kind of treatment. If the Switch follows the same life cycle as the 3DS, then the latter should be entitled to a more powerful version in the years to come., without this new model being entitled to exclusive games given the lack of success that this decision had on 3DS. However, we can expect an important new Nintendo game to accompany the release of this new model, like Metroid Dread released at the same time as the Switch OLED. In any case, we just have to wait for the next Nintendo game announcements to find out in which direction the Japanese manufacturer is heading.
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By TheXsableJournalist jeuxvideo.com