Did the UK government just accidentally leak Nintendo’s Switch successor?
Enlarge / The big old question mark just got a lot bigger...
As the Nintendo Switch approaches the sixth anniversary of its initial launch, Nintendo has been extremely coy about the prospects for a true successor to the console (no, the Switch OLED doesn’t count). This week, though, a stray redaction in a government document regarding the proposed Microsoft/Activision merger has some industry watchers speculating that the announcement of a Switch successor could be coming in the near future.
All that speculation focuses on a single line buried in 43 sprawling pages of appendices in a report from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which recently came down against Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision. In discussing services that could plausibly compete with the cloud-gaming features of Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, the appendix notes that Nintendo Switch Online "is only available on the Nintendo Switch device and [redacted]."
That telltale "and" is interesting, of course, because Nintendo Switch Online is currently only available on the Nintendo Switch (as the name implies). The CMA redaction following that "and" could easily describe a forthcoming console that Nintendo doesn't want formally announced via a regulatory filing (e.g. "...available on the Nintendo Switch device and [another console Nintendo is currently developing]").
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from Gaming & Culture – Ars Technica https://ift.tt/MIB1XbS