“Many New Software Titles” Headed to Switch This Year, According to Nintendo

Nintendo’s been getting some well-deserved flak for its release lineup in the last year and for what is currently looking like slim pickings for the rest of this year. 2020 saw the release of a handful of major titles, the most notable being Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was directly responsible for causing a massive influx of new Switch owners. But other than Paper Mario: The Origami King and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Nintendo’s other first-party releases last year included a number of ports of existing games, including Pikmin 3 Deluxe and Super Mario 3D All-Stars. One of their only other brand new titles, the digital-only Super Mario Bros. 35, was a short-lived game that only saw the light of day for five months as part of the Super Mario Bros. 35th Anniversary celebration.

The start of 2021 hasn’t been a strong showing of first-party Nintendo titles either, as the only releases have been Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury (a combo of a port and new content) and New Pokémon Snap. Mario Golf: Super Rush is slated for a June release, while the port of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is coming in July and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are expected towards the end of the year, but Nintendo is relying heavily on third-party support to fill the glaring gaps in its release schedule.

As we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from most industries in the last year, COVID is impacting gaming releases and making development difficult, but Nintendo doesn’t get to use COVID as an excuse for what is now a mounting number of games that were announced years ago but have been MIA ever since. Where is Metroid Prime 4, which was first revealed to be in-progress four years ago? What’s going on with the Donkey Kong franchise? The last installment was Tropical Freeze in 2014, which got — you guessed it — a Switch port in 2018. What’s going on with Breath of the Wild 2, other than what we saw in the teaser trailer in 2019? (And why hasn’t Nintendo acknowledged the 35th anniversary of the Zelda franchise? Where is the fanfare that the Super Mario Bros. franchise got for the last year?) And while Bayonetta 3 isn’t technically a first-party title, as it’s being developed by Platinum, it is a major Switch-exclusive title that was first announced in 2017 and remains nowhere to be seen. Even Nintendo’s support of New Horizons is frustrating players, who are incredibly vocal on Nintendo’s social media pages about what they feel is a lack of content so soon into the game’s lifespan.

While the answers to these questions aren’t clear, it’s possible they may be coming sometime soon. Late last week, Nintendo of Japan published a Q&A with President Shuntaro Furukawa on the company’s financial results briefing for the fiscal year ended March 2021. When asked what the current scale of active Switch users is, Furukawa addressed the question but also went on to make the following comment:

“Many new software titles will be released this fiscal year, starting in the first quarter, which we think will help continuously expand the range of consumers who play Nintendo Switch to include those who haven’t played Nintendo Switch in a while or are completely new users.”

“Many” is subjective and also doesn’t specify whether Furukawa is referring specifically to first-party titles, though it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume as much given the topic of discussion. We’re already in the middle part of May and E3 is coming up next month, so if Nintendo has any major announcements up its sleeve it’d make sense for them to happen during E3. But the company has a lot of ground it needs to cover to start giving players more confidence that it’s not merely riding the waves of previous successes and relying on ports of Wii U titles to fill the Switch library between third-party releases.

What announcements do you hope to hear from Nintendo at E3 2021 or sometime in the near future? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Nintendo of Japan