Bad news about that Nintendo Switch Pro, folks

The Nintendo Switch has been a roaring success, with the console having sold over 52 million units since it launched in 2017. While that figure puts the Switch well behind the Wii, which sold 101 million units in its lifetime, it only puts the Switch 2 million units shy of eclipsing the combined sales of the N64 and the GameCube. Talk of Nintendo capitalising on this success with a Pro SKU of the console has been bubbling under for a few months now, but nothing has yet come to fruition.

This month alone, for example, we have seen Digitimes claiming that a new Nintendo Switch console would "enter mass production in 1Q20", although it offered no further details on the matter. Moreover, it has been just over a week since Wccftech reported on rumours of a Switch Pro with a custom NVIDIA Volta GPU being in development.

You can now discount the above, at least for the time being. Brought to our attention by Takashi Mochizuki of The Wall Street Journal, Nintendo has confirmed that it will not launch a new Nintendo Switch console this year. Specifically, Shuntaro Furukawa, the current President of Nintendo, confirmed this during a Corporate Management Policy Briefing today. We have provided a screenshot below, but the statement is on page 10 of the accompanying PDF should you wish to read it yourself.

Nintendo has not ruled out releasing a new Switch at some stage, though. However, it will not arrive before the end of the year. Hence, this announcement does not preclude the arrival of a Switch Pro SKU, nor the existence of a Volta-powered one either.