[paulmd]

> To bring this point home, for years there was hubub in the industry that Nintendo would bring out some kind of Switch Pro with 4k output and faster guts, rumors swirled around and around until Nintendo finally brought out? The Switch Light.

Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context. And oddly enough, Nintendo themselves have pseudo-confirmed the launch will occur in Q1 next year via various official statements:

https://x.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1787736518762881197

(and then they later confirmed that they won't discuss it this year... so it's going to be Q1 next year.)

And again, to underline this point: the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers. It’s not even just Nintendo being nintendo and favoring older cheaper hardware, they seem to have internally had some pullback or change of heart back a year or two ago such that they decided not to release it.

And obviously at some point the hardware will be relatively weaker than the original switch was at its launch, so at this point they may have to update the hardware again.

But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!” when Nintendo literally had a console generation ready to go, as confirmed by multiple sources, and then just inexplicably decided to pull the plug or delay it for 2 years for inscrutable Nintendo reasons. That’s the Nintendo being Nintendo part - and we have their confirmed-in-financials timeline for release now.

[johnnyanmac]

>Switch Lite is not the console people were referring to in that context.

I assume GP was talking more in the 2020 era than right now. That era where a "switch pro was rumored", and then they unveiled the Switch Lite.

Then rumors swirled again, and we got the Switch OLED.

by now we know they completely skipped the idea of a mid generation refresh, so current rumors go straight to a new generation.

>the hardware itself has literally been ready to go since 2022 or before (prominently, there was an enormous amount of stuff in the hacked nvidia data dump and it's all essentially confirmed accurate at this point) and the delay has frankly baffled industry-watchers

plans change, especially in this economy. It may be baffling to western economists, but the software side of Nintendo also isn't afraid to sit on fully finished games if the timing is off. Advanced Wars remake was delayed a year for bad timing (to put it lightly). Xenoblade was finished for a while, and decided to push its release date up to space it out from Splatoon 3.

They read the winds changing, and realized Switch base was still selling well (and even if it wasn't, Nintendo famously has a decent war chest for tough times). So they just sat. They aren't on the same pulse as Sony/Microsoft, so they aren't pressured by the competition or hardcore consumers to upgrade. Japanese companies have a different attitude towards shareholders, so they aren't afraid to push back if they deem the long term solution is to wait. Nintendo truly goes at its own pace, for better and worse.

>But yeah switch is a bad example of “see, rumors are sometimes wrong!”

I think it's the perfect example of "rumors are wrong". Because I'm sure most industry rumors are right... at the time the rumor holder got the info. That info can and often is outdated, simply because situations change so fast in gamedev. So don't take them as gospel.