The next Nintendo Direct will be held on Wednesday, February 21, 2024, the company has confirmed. The time for the Partner Showcase has been slated for 6 am PT/9 am ET/2 pm BST. Also, it is expected to last for 25 minutes. Since it is a partner showcase, it will feature third-party titles created by different developers for the Nintendo platform.
The titles planned for the showcase are those with a release date that falls in the first half of the year. To be clear, games currently in development by Nintendo’s first-party studios will not feature in the showcase.
“Watch on-demand via YouTube on 2/21 at 6 am PT for around 25 mins of info focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the first half of 2024 from our publishing and development partners,” said the company.
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Earlier this month, it was rumored that the staple February Nintendo Direct livestream would be a Partner Showcase. Nate the Hate podcast which regularly breaks stories in the gaming industry first shared the news. The Monday announcement has now confirmed that rumor.
“I’m going into the first Nintendo Direct of this year with the expectation that it’s going to be a Partner Direct,” Nate said. “I don’t think Nintendo will host a general Direct this February, I think they’re going to do third parties instead.”
For the past five years, Nintendo Direct has been held in February. Therefore, it has become one of the showcases that Nintendo fans anticipate. Another news that fans are anticipating from the Japanese gaming giant is the announcement of a Switch successor. It was previously widely believed that the Switch successor would be released later this year.
According to a Bloomberg report last month, the console will feature an 8-inch LCD screen. Last summer, it was widely reported that the company had handed development kits to key partner studios. However, Nintendo executives denied the news.
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In the company’s latest financial report, the question about the risks the company is mindful of in building a successor to its dedicated gaming platforms came up. The company’s president Shuntaro Furukawa said that they are not taking anything for granted.
Nintendo shares slump following Switch successor delay
On Monday, February 19, 2024, it was reported by Bloomberg and games media that the Switch successor was delayed until early 2025. That news sent Nintendo shares tumbling by 6%. The Japanese gaming giant is yet to comment on a Switch successor. The best it has said in that regard was that it is always working on new hardware and software.
Nintendo Switch was first launched on March 3, 2017. Next month, the console will be 7 years old. On average, the lifecycle of a video game console is between 5 and 7 years. This tallies with Moore’s law which postulates that processing power takes a 10-fold leap every five years.
Also, Switch is one of the oldest consoles in the current generation of consoles with the PS5 and Xbox series X launching in 2020. The big question is how much longer can the Kyoto-based gaming giant milk the Switch?
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Nevertheless, Switch’s sales numbers continue to defy what analysts expect from a 7-year-old console. In the company’s latest earnings report, it mentioned that 139 million units of Nintendo Switch have been sold worldwide as of December 2023.
Also, the company raised its full-year sales forecast for the console following strong sales. “We want to maintain the momentum of the Switch business,” Furukawa said in the earnings briefing at the time. If the news that Switch’s release window has been delayed, it means the console will spend a record 8 years on the market.
