Nintendo plans to support Switch for 7 to 10 years

Nintendo Switch – a long life is apparently ahead of it

The head of Nintendo has said he wants to support the Switch for much longer than the usual five or six-year console life.

The Switch is an anomaly in many ways, not least the fact that it’s Nintendo’s second console this generation – after the abject failure of the Wii U.

As reported earlier this week, in nine months the Switch has sold more than the Wii U did in more than four years, which is obviously good news for Nintendo but the question now is what do they do next?

Third party publishers do want to support the format but it’s so much less powerful than the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 that they can’t do so with many of their existing games. But it doesn’t seem as if Nintendo has any intention of replacing the Switch with a more powerful model – quite the opposite in fact.

Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima has reportedly stated to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, as translated by Nintendo Soup, that he wants to carry on selling the Switch for more than just the five or six-year average of most consoles.

Apparently, the Switch could be supported for up to seven to 10 years, although there’s no detail on exactly how that would work.

The 3DS is already about to enter its seventh year, but support for it has been slowing down for some time as Nintendo concentrates on the Switch.

So it’s entirely possible that while the Switch is technically supported for seven years or more it’s superseded by a newer model long before that. And that’s ignoring the fact that there are likely to be hardware revisions before thern which change the physical design but not its innards.

Of course, Nintendo are always impossible to predict. But what these comments do seem to mean is that the company has no intention of dropping the format any time soon.

Will the Switch have its on family of variants?

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