According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
Is this the first mention of a Switch 2?
Officially yes. As far as I know they haven’t mentioned anything about next console before.
There’s been lots of rumours regarding the existence and the chips and etc. The only thing official before this was “We have no plans to release new hardware before the next fiscal year.”, i.e. April 2024 is the earliest we could see it.
Some people also see the whole “Nintendo telling the Mario + Rabbids crew they should have waited for the next console for the sequel” thing to mean a new console is somewhat near. I don’t believe that’s indicative of that though.
Rumours of next Switch started from 2018, if I recall correctly, so I am just going to ignore that. Don’t care much about leaks and rumours anyway.
Yeah, people are saying that, but I don’t think it means the opposite. If next console was close, Ubisoft could have just waited, but they thought “Na, the wait’s too long, let’s release it now!”.
Also, they probably didn’t have that discussion just before game launch, they probably had it somewhere during early-to-mid development. It would be weird if Nintendo said nothing while Ubisoft was developing the game (with their input on characters etc.), and then when they were ready to launch Nintendo said, “Why are you launching it, wait!”