Soundwave said:
Not necessarily. It would be very stupid for Nintendo to tank their holiday sales for a product that won't be available until 6 months from now or when ever really. They have product to sell in the here and now and a holiday season ahead of them. I've said it before but in today's day and age, announcing hardware 6+ months in advance is just stupid unless your existing hardware is basically dead like the Wii U was and even then Nintendo really did not start any actual promotion/product reveal for the Switch until just about 4 months ahead of launch, Switch Lite and Switch OLED were also only announced about 3 months prior to launch. |
You're correct. It wouldn't be that big a deal to announce it 6 months early if they were launching during their peak selling period. But Nintendo isn't going to announce it now and suffer lost sales during the holiday season. Its not like its a normal console launch where they have a new concept that requires extra development time or a completely foreign chipset. Typically you announce it at the last possible moment before widespread dev kits go out. But in this case they can hold off on widespread dev kits for a while. Key devs will have them but only ones who can keep it a secret. It will be acceptable to early on to release lower key games on it that don't benefit from the new hardware and patch them later. And there will be very few exclusives for the system that don't appear on the original switch at least early on. Probably there will be some 3rd party ports that run only on the new system but Nintendo will release cross gen for some time. So there's no rush to announce it. I expect it to release the same day Breath of the Wild 2 comes out. So if they announced in January and show a playable form of Breath of the Wild 2 running on the new hardware at that time i think that would be sufficient.
