Nintendo is "working without stopping" on its next new console after Switch

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Switch's successor must "create a new experience"

Nintendo Switch
(Image credit: Future)

While we're waiting to hear if Nintendo Switch Pro will ever become more than a rumor, Nintendo's president says the company is hard at work on a full-on Switch successor.

Shuntaro Furukawa, who has served as Nintendo's president since 2018, talked about how the company can "propose new forms of entertainment" in an interview with Nikkei, as translated by VGC. He explained that both the company's hardware and software teams are in the same building and "communicating closely" on what the next era of games - and beyond - from Nintendo could look like. 

"In order to create a single piece of hardware, we have to do a lot of preparation several years in advance, so we are working without stopping," Furukawa said. "In the end, the deciding factor in whether or not to commercialize a product is whether it can create a new experience."

Furukawa then went back to a recent refrain for the company, which is that Nintendo Switch is now at roughly the midway point in its product lifecycle after launching in 2017: "since one piece of hardware can be used to play both stationary and portable games, we can offer a wide variety of software for this purpose. The life cycle can still be extended."

It's hard to picture Nintendo ever returning to its previous business model of creating discrete home and handheld consoles with their own largely separate development pipelines. If we accept Switch's all-in-one approach as a baseline, it's intriguing to wonder what new forms of entertainment it might be working on right now.

Nintendo's current console has plenty of life left in it - get a sampling of what's ahead with our guide to upcoming Switch games for 2021 and beyond.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.