Nintendo Switch Will Continue To Get 1st-Party Software Until March 2025
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has outlined Nintendo Switch’s longevity, and it’s a whole lot longer than you probably expect.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Furukawa said this in an interview with Japanese newspaper outlet Nikkei:
“We are still working on software for the Switch for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025.
In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, we hope to sustain the momentum of Zelda and the [Super Mario Bros] movie, with focus on the holiday sales season. As for hardware, we will maximize not only new demand for the hardware, but also for those buying second consoles and replacements.”
As a reminder, the Nintendo Switch launched in March of 2017. Furukawa is saying that their plans for the console will extend its support for new software for eight years. That’s not unprecedented, but quite a long timeframe for the company to be releasing games for a single platform.
To put this in context, the original release of the NES dates all the way back to July 15, 1983, in its native country of Japan, as the Family Computer. The last game Nintendo released for the NES was the falling block puzzler Wario’s Woods, which released in Europe in 1995. That’s a staggering 12 year gap, which was partly extended because of the limitations of global distribution without a digital storefront at the time.
We do need to also remember that Nintendo’s norms really are to keep releasing software for their console for a year or two after they have replaced that game hardware with a brand new console. For example, the 3DS was launched in 2010. The last game Nintendo released for the 3DS was Kirby’s Extra Epic Yarn. That game released in 2019, two years after the launch of the Nintendo Switch, but also nearly a
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