An industry analyst has predicted that Nintendo will skip the Nintendo Switch Pro in favour of its next major console release.
This comes from a GamesIndustry.biz report (via VGC) earlier in the week, where the publication asked trusted industry analysts to evaluate their predictions from last year, and make some for the year ahead.
Ampere Analysis’ Piers Hard-Rolls talked about their predictions for Nintendo, its upcoming consoles, and their opinion on the sought-after Nintendo Switch Pro:
“I’m currently expecting the console market year-on-year performance to be quite flat in 2022 as Switch sales decline and we come off what has been an amazing couple of years for console gaming,” he began. “Even so, [the] Nintendo Switch family of devices will once again be the best-selling consoles in 2022 at around 21 million sold to consumers, aided by the release of Switch OLED. I’m not expecting a Switch Pro in 2022. We have a next-gen Nintendo console in our forecasts for late 2024, so I’m not convinced a ‘Pro’ model is going to appear at all.
“PS5 will outsell Xbox Series X|S on a global basis,” Hard-Rolls added. “The predicted combined sales to gamers are around 28million. PS5 and Xbox Series X will remain supply constrained, but I expect availability to improve slowly over the year and to be in a better place as we arrive at the holiday season.”
Whilst speculation about a potential Nintendo Switch Pro resurfaces every now and again, back in July of last year Nintendo stated it has “no plans” for such a console: “We just announced that Nintendo Switch(OLED Model) will launch in October, 2021, and have no plans for launching any other model at this time,” said the company.
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That said, journalist Jeff Grubb sees another Switch model coming this year: “I still have only ever personally heard 2022 for a Switch Pro. And if that still happens, I’ll continue to speculate that [it] will have 4K output with a significantly more efficient chip with DLSS.”
In other news, GameStop is reportedly getting into NFTs and the blockchain to help offset the businesses decline.