And rumor has it that next week’s (as yet unannounced) Nintendo Direct will be a Partner Direct, meaning it won’t be about in-house developed titles.

On the Nate the Hate podcast, the host spoke with Digital Foundry (and DF Retro) editor John Linnemann about the Switch’s successor. According to them, not only is there a chance that Nintendo will unveil it in March, but that the Japanese company will do so before the Game Developers Conference (which takes place between March 18 and March 12). The two say the platform should have at least 10 gigabytes of memory, but Linneman says 16GB is possible, given the Steam Deck’s specifications. This would allow them to run current-gen games with the expected visual downgrading. As for next week’s Nintendo Direct, Nate the Hate says it will be a third-party show, not Nintendo’s own developments (which Nintendo is guaranteed to save for the Switch’s successor).

Shuntaro Furukawa, Nintendo’s president, told investors during the company’s quarterly earnings report that it’s more important than ever to have unique offerings to compete in a much more competitive market: “We approach our business every day with a deep sense of urgency. The generational transition of platforms in the dedicated game console business is never easy. We have experienced significant challenges following successful platforms many times, so we never consider our current situation to be completely secure. In addition, as you pointed out, our business is always subject to strong competition. From a broader entertainment perspective, not only video games but also various forms of leisure are competitors in this industry. In this environment, it’s more important than ever to continue to offer unique propositions in order to become a brand that customers choose.

In order to continue to provide innovative entertainment that can be enjoyed by our customers around the world, we believe that the best strategy at this time is to continue with our integrated hardware-software dedicated game console business. As such, we are advancing various research and development efforts. Since our products are not daily necessities, if they are not interesting, we will quickly lose people’s attention. That’s why it’s important to continue efforts to make people feel close to Nintendo outside of the dedicated game console, to increase the number of customers who support Nintendo IP in the long term and to maintain ties with our customers,” Furukawa said.

So it’s an interesting situation for Nintendo: after the Wii, they went from strength to strength with the Wii U, and the Switch was great again… now another failure?

Source: WCCFTech, YouTube, VGC