The only good thing about this release date is seeing some users with their crow avatars .

Hahah I'll have to change mine when I get on a PC. Its so annoying that March counts as a 2017 win. I knew this financial year hence going for 2016. Didn't expect them to miss the Christmas window though. I guess Zelda has been delayed again so they had to push back.

Didn't Sony and My crow off announce the name of their consoles within a year of their respective releases?

not surprising. i always said it was coming out in 2017.

I've always felt that Day 1 console buyers tend to be the hardcore fan base and generally an older audience as its their own money and can buy it whenever rather than rely on it been a Christmas gift so with a March release one thing I can see is that it will hit the core Nintendo fan base as a day 1 purchase whilst building up a game library over the rest of 2017 to go into it's first holiday period with a strong and wider game library in time for the more casual and parents buying it for their kids market as well as presenting itself to day one X1/PS4 owners could be a lot more likely to be interested in grabbing a new piece of hardware as it would be 4 years since they launched.

They must be fairly confident if they're gonna launch their flagship system in Spring. Either that or they're very wary of VR.

I fully expected 2016 honestly, but if they were gonna do 2017 I sort of expected spring so this isn't a massive shock. I'm more surprised they actually had the balls to delay Zelda again.

I told y'all it was gonna be 2017.
I just didn't expect it to be in March. And no e3 appearance? Wtf is Nintendo thinking? They can't ever expect to win over fan trust with that stuff. Plus Zelda U got delayed for several years...

This is gonna be a huge difference to launching in holiday season 2016, that would have been lunacy.

These are good points and the core fanbase is strong enough where Nintendo can pretty much launch at any month and sell out.  Again the beauty of a March release is shoring up sw, strongest possible hw (14nm) and even splatoon fans could very well get the sequel in that launch window/summer to maintain sales until holidays (3D mario? , metroid, etc)

By the time NX launches PS4 will have 60 million user base and Xbox One will have 30 million user base with cheaper option. Plus PS4 Neo and Xbox One two will also release. Competition will be fierce.