Censored, of course, but the UK’s competition and markets watchdog, the CMA, has named the following hardware for the big N.

The CMA has launched an in-depth investigation into Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King and sometimes publishes documents in this regard. The appendices contain data to calculate the market shares used in the regulator’s preliminary findings, including the supply share of cloud gaming services. Aside from the figures, however, there is an interesting point in the CMA’s explanation. Beyond how it calculated these market shares, it referred to an as-yet-unannounced piece of hardware, which might be the Nintendo Switch Pro.

“Nintendo Switch Online has been excluded from our shares as Nintendo’s cloud gaming service is minimal. Nintendo’s cloud gaming service is only available on the Nintendo Switch device and [redacted]. Nintendo Switch Online gives gamers access to online play and cloud saving, amongst other features. We, therefore, see Nintendo Switch Online as predominately an online multiplayer service rather than a cloud gaming service,” the CMA says.

So far, we’ve also known that Nintendo Switch Online will be on the following big N hardware (the Japanese company won’t make another one from scratch after creating one for Switch, which has already surpassed PlayStation 4 sales). We don’t see the logic in CMA listing an older platform, so we don’t think they’ve listed the Nintendo Wii U, but the next-generation technology, which would be logical because we’ve heard a lot of rumors about the Nintendo Switch Pro (using DLSS technology), as well as that the company has canceled this project.

In August, Nikkei wrote that the new hardware would not be released until the end of March (the end of the fiscal year), which is now a certainty, because a new console is not announced and released in a month, so the latest Nikkei article (the console could come in 2024) is plausible, as is the fact that the company is already in talks with component manufacturers.

Will Nintendo follow Switch’s lead or release an entirely new console? (The NES-SNES-N64 mostly followed the formula, but the GameCube dropped cartridges, the Wii moved the audience towards motion controls, the Wii U garnered attention for its GamePad, while the Switch brought portability…)

Source: WCCFTech