The Nintendo Switch is in its filler era

After years of speculation and wild rumors, it’s official: Nintendo’s new console is on the horizon.

In a tweet this week, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa confirmed that the company plans to announce its Switch follow-up in the next fiscal year (though that won’t be during its upcoming June Direct). It’s an exciting piece of news, but one that shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone paying attention to the Switch’s first-party game lineup this year: The Nintendo Switch is already in its filler era.

I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. While this has so far been a strange year for Nintendo filled with B — and sometimes C — releases, it’s given the Switch a host of niche titles that I imagine players will look back on fondly years from now. It may feel like we’re in a Switch drought right now, but enjoy this moment defined by left-field curiosities while you can. Once the Switch 2 drops, we’re back to the races.

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The filler era

I first began to suspect that Nintendo was scaling back Switch support last November. That’s when the company dropped a surprise remake of Super Mario RPG. It was an exciting announcement, but something felt a little off. It wasn’t marketed as a major release. That made sense when I played the final product, a 1:1 remake that felt conservative in its ambitions.

The biggest tell, though, was the mystery surrounding the project’s developer. Nintendo kept that information hidden prior to launch, even barring reviewers from revealing it. Once the game came out, credits revealed that the project didn’t come from Square Enix or Nintendo; it was outsourced to the smaller ArtePiazza. With Switch 2 rumors heating up, I began wondering if perhaps Nintendo was filling up its first-party schedule with smaller projects like this from satellite