The Nintendo Switch is over five years old at this point, and even with multiple variants available, an excellent library of games, and a slew of major upcoming titles to look forward to, common wisdom would suggest that it is in the latter years of its life. Nintendo has insisted time and again that the Switch still has plenty of life left in it yet, but might the company be preparing to begin working on its successor in the near future?
Nintendo’s recent spending certainly seems to suggest that. Courtesy of data mentioned in the company’s recent reports (that was then neatly compiled and summarized by Famiboards user fwd-bwd), it seems to have spent a massive amount of money in order to stockpile raw materials and supplies.
As you can see in the table below, Nintendo spent 66,517 million yen on raw materials and supplies in fiscal year 2022. That’s significantly higher than what the company spends on the same in most years. In fiscal year 2019, spending in that area stood at 32,432 yen, which is when Nintendo was preparing to begin production on the Nintendo Switch Lite, and the revised version of the base Switch model.
However, it doesn’t look like manufacturing has started for this new mystery hardware just yet, since the work in progress section in the table below doesn’t show an awful lot of spending in the previous fiscal year.
There are, of course, several factors to consider- raw materials have become much harder to acquire these last couple of years for hardware manufacturers, so it’s entirely possible that Nintendo is stockpiling to shore up its reserves, while prices have also risen for the same by quite some margin. Even with both those factors put together, the significantly higher spending is still hard to explain away.
Leaks of a Nintendo Switch successor with support for Nvidia DLSS have been doing the rounds for quite some time (including as recently as earlier this year)- whether that’s something Nintendo is gearing up to begin working on in earnest remains to be seen.
