Nintendo Switch successor due out in 2024, according to Nikkei

Nintendo Switch is just two months away from its sixth birthday. Nintendo's hybrid console is already the fourth best-selling console of all time (the latest figures show that there are already around 120 million units in homes around the world) and the company's estimate for 2023 is to sell a further 20 million units.

However, it is also a fact that the system has lagged far behind the needs of today's software. A console with components from six years ago will hardly be able to handle some of the most recent releases that are ported, and in many cases it will be with graphical limitations or directly sacrificing quality and performance. But all that may have an expiry date, if the latest news from Japan is anything to go by.

The Japanese site Nikkei (via Reddit) has published an article today in which they report that Nintendo is already in talks with component suppliers to begin production of the Nintendo Switch's successor, which is expected to go on sale in mid-2024. A claim that Nintendo has not confirmed at the time of writing, but would be in line with recent statements from Digital Foundry.

Although we've talked in the past about the rumoured Tegra239 chip in the Nintendo Switch 2, the article doesn't reveal Nintendo's component partners for the new console. What seems clear is that, if released in the middle of next year, it would make The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom the last major release in Nintendo Switch's lifecycle, provided Mario doesn't have the final say on the matter.