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Nintendo is one of The Pokémon Company’s three stakeholders. The link between Pokémon and Nintendo consoles is ironclad and decades-long, and Pokémon is probably one of the two biggest brands on those consoles, alongside Mario. So why did the Pokémon Presents livestream on this fair Pokémon Day go without a single mention of Nintendo’s now officially announced next console, the Switch 2?
It isn’t as if Nintendo and The Pokémon Company can pretend the two star games of the presentation — freshly announced multiplayer battler Pokémon Champions, and Pokémon Legends: Z-A — aren’t coming to Switch 2. Champions is in development for “the Nintendo Switch family of consoles,” as well as mobile, and has no release date. It would be bizarre if it wasn’t, at least, a cross-generational release. Z-A is due in late 2025, and the Switch 2 is confirmed for a 2025 release, so it could reasonably be confirmed for the new console without jumping the gun on its release date.
Pokémon Presents is a big deal for a community that is closely but not exactly aligned with hardcore Nintendo fans, so the livestream presented a great moment to give Nintendo’s new system a push with some of its most important customers. It was also a low-risk way to keep the Switch 2 flame alive in the long gap between its slender January unveiling and the major info-dump scheduled for April 2. It seems like a missed opportunity.
There are a couple of reasons why Nintendo might have chosen to keep its powder dry. One is bureaucratic (and Nintendo can be a very bureaucratic company), and the other presentational.
From a scheduling point of view, it might just have been a case of two separate PR roadmaps that just couldn’t be brought into alignment. Given the general silence around the Switch 2 since its reveal, Nintendo clearly intends to keep its powder dry for the big April push, and has likely NDA’d its partners accordingly. But Pokémon Day can’t be moved, and the Presents livestream, with some big announcements, is expected. Nintendo might have made an exception for The Pokémon Company — which, again, it partially owns — but this might have put some partners’ noses out of joint, or even annoyed Nintendo’s own marketing teams. Too bad.
However, there’s another reason Nintendo might not have wanted Champions and Z-A to join the untitled Mario Kart game as official, first-party Switch 2 games yet. Z-A will be released on the original Switch, and Champions probably will, too; even if it won’t, it will be available on smartphones. These are not cutting-edge, bespoke Switch 2 releases, with visuals to match. (Although the last Pokémon game, Scarlet and Violet, ran so poorly on the Switch that developer Game Freak’s engine could clearly use some of the new machine’s extra power.)
It might complicate Nintendo’s messaging around the Switch 2 — which presents it as a flashier, more powerful Switch, as the name implies — to start showing graphically simple cross-gen games like Z-A or cross-platform mobile titles like Champions for it at this early stage. Suddenly, tech enthusiasts would be pouring over the footage and trying to assess which machine it was running on, or looking for evidence of technologies like DLSS in action. For all it might have excited the Pokémon community to know these two releases will be available on the new console, it might ultimately have dampened excitement for everyone else.
So Nintendo, as it often does, chose the safe option, and asked The Pokémon Company to pretend that nothing was happening. Certainly not a new Nintendo handheld console in the storied lineage that brought Pokémon to the world. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Kurt Indovina
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