The successor to the Nintendo Switch could arrive as soon as next year, cost $400, and be more of an “iterative” upgrade “rather than a revolution.” That’s according to the CEO of a Tokyo-based video game consultancy firm, who recently spoke with GamesIndustry.biz.
The Nintendo Switch originally launched on March 3, 2017 with a $300 price tag. The hybrid portable console quickly gained popularity for its versatility and excellent game library. The console’s eShop has offered everything from unexpected AAA ports of titles like Doom and The Witcher 3, alongside Nintendo’s quality first-party offerings like Breath of the Wild. That’s in addition to countless indie darlings. An upgraded OLED model launched in July of 2021, which gave the Switch’s visuals a brighter and more colorful makeover, but it stopped short of actually providing any actual performance upgrades (and despite years of rumors and fan anticipation, a “Switch Pro” never surfaced).
In GamesIndustry.biz’s yearly discussion with video game industry analysts, (h/t, VGC), Dr. Serkan Toto, the CEO of Kantan games, expects the Switch’s successor to arrive next year at $400, $100 more than the original Switch. Interestingly, he also claims that “Nintendo might add some bells and whistles to the device, but it will be similar to the current Switch.”
Though the Switch is plenty capable of delivering pretty games (just see Tears of the Kingdom, for example), GPU tech company Nvidia has made improvements in its tech since the Switch’s debut. And as Digital Foundry speculates, the kinds of chips that could hypothetically end up in a Switch successor could even see games such as Cyberpunk 2077 running at around 30-frames per second. Kotaku has reached out to Dr. Serkan Toto for further comment on how a new Switch might be an iterative improvement on the original.
Further, according to Dr. Serkan Toto, the popularity of the Pokémongame series, which has been played on the go since the first in the franchise arrived on the Nintendo portable console Game Boy in the 1990s, means that “there is no way on Earth Nintendo will drop the portability feature for their next big thing.” However, those games are still likely to come in at a $70 price point, the new norm for AAA titles.
A Switch successor that aims to preserve the experiences players have come to love on Nintendo’s hybrid platform certainly sounds appealing, though many are hoping for a more substantial graphical improvement given the current hardware’s notable limitations.
