The big Nintendo Direct usually doesn’t happen until September, but this year the Mario maker is sneaking out a slightly smaller showcase at the tail end of August for indie and third-party games. Does that mean we’re getting the official reveal of the Switch 2 next month instead?
Nintendo announced a “Indie World Showcase + Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase” for August 27. The event will begin at 10:00 a.m. ET and run 40 minutes, which suggests a pretty beefy list of game announcements, trailers, and updates. “There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during either of these presentations,” the company confirmed.
What can we expect then? A MySims remaster, leaked on storefronts last week and corroborated by one of Kotaku’s sources, seems a likely candidate. Is it too much to hope that Team Cherry finally announces a release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong? The game skipped every other summer showcase, including a June Nintendo Direct, though fans have also gotten used to the silence at this point.
But packaging a Partner Showcase and Indie World together ahead of when the normal big fall Nintendo Direct usually takes place certainly makes it seem like the company is gearing up for the announcement of its next video game console. On top of years of rumors and months of reported leaks, we know that when it came to the rollout of the original Switch, Nintendo revealed it during a September event and then launched it the following March.
The rollout of a Switch 2, or whatever Nintendo decides to call it, might go slightly differently following reports that the hardware has now been delayed until after the end of the current fiscal year, meaning April 2025 or later. But at this point anything Nintendo does is now accompanied by a mention of the Switch 2 because, even as the current console ages gracefully with a respectable lineup of games, a successor feels long-overdue. This is already the longest a Nintendo console has gone without a replacement.