On Twitter before a Nintendo Direct earlier this year:

This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.

Nintendo posts a surprising number of these little announcements on Twitter, which means I usually learn about them from elsewhere. In this case, I think it was The Verge, who wasn't alone in using headlines to emphasize not that Nintendo would be making plenty of announcements as usual, but that they wouldn't be announcing the console to follow the Switch.

Is that really the angle Nintendo players are interested in? Of course they aren't announcing it right now, I'd have thought. The Switch remains Nintendo's hit console of its history. Major and independent developers have flocked to release their own games for it. Nintendo has updated and re-released many of their titles from the Wii U, and is still annonucing loving remakes and adaptations of Super Mario RPG and The Thousand-Year Door. They've based a monthly subscription service largely on making available a surprisingly satisfying Virtual Console back-catalogue. Of course they don't need to divert attention from the high score they're still handily racking up.

Nintendo's home consoles, from the NES through the Switch, released in Japan in the years 1983, 1990, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2012, and 2017. The longest stretch is that of the NES, for which new games were released even after the SNES arrived, but generally each console's status as the "current" one has lasted five or six years. According to Mr Furukawa, it will have been eight years after the Switch's release date when its successor is even announced!

So, to the extent I'm predicting what the successor to the Switch will be, I find myself having to consider the particular success of the Switch.

Nintendo's other big disruptor to gaming tradition was the Wii. Sony and Microsoft were releasing traditional consoles with more power for more money than ever, but Nintendo upstaged them with a single trailer that ignited the imagination: in your own living room, you could physically use a remote-shaped controller like a baseball bat, a golf club, Link's sword, Samus' arm cannon, a violin bow, a sauté spatula, a steering column for racing, and so on – all achieved by a relatively cheap console using relatively cheap controllers with relatively cheap accellerometers. The trailer barely even contained any game footage. Along with the handheld 3DS's screen that displayed genuine 3D content without requiring glasses, Nintendo seemed to be winning hearts and customers by finding its version of Apple's "think different" for the gaming world.

With its portable GamePad, the Wii U seemed their attempt to carry their version of "think different" even further, but – despite remaining their best console in my opinion – it didn't sell particularly well. This seemingly prompted a return to whatever drawing board would eventually bear the design of the Switch.

Instead of aiming to introduce another new and different idea to gaming, the Switch was a refined amalgamation of Nintendo's best ideas through its history. The detachable controllers work both as "Wii Remotes," and even the remake of Skyward Sword is playable with the same sword-swinging and shield-raising physical actions as on the Wii. But they also combine to form a traditional gamepad, and just about every game available on the Switch can be played in traditional button-operated fashion. All graphics are in HD (unlike the Wii), and the tablet-sized main console rivals the power and efficiency of the textbook-sized Wii U. Nintendo's flagship handheld device and flagship home console became the same product, and they're still the only major company that's achieved this. And again, along with plenty of partners, they're still putting out new, highly-anticipated games for this thing almost eight years after launch.

So, what exactly is Nintendo going to announce next spring? Are they going to take another risk on "think different" while the Switch is still strong? That seems difficult to believe after the lesson learned from the Wii U. I don't get the impression they're going to try to replace the Switch with something based on that notion. I can see a somehow next-level console that retains backward compatibility with the Switch, as the 3DS was to the DS. But if it's "think different," then it's going to complement the Switch, not replace it.

There's one other notable area of technology that has advanced since the Wii's days, and that's headset devices. Just as Nintendo had shown interest in 3D content long before the 3DS, they've shown interest in augmenting reality and dabbling in "VR" with the 3DS's AR games, the "Toy-Con" cardboard mask, and the good old Virtual Boy. (Even the Wii, before it was revealed, was rumoured to be a headset device.)

Headset devices, while now available and affordable, are still a rarity. We know "available and affordable" isn't enough to make everyone buy or love them, but, unlike in the days of the Wii, we're beyond the days when making a headset device meant making a primitive or bulky one. High-performance headsets are halfway comfortable now, though they're still not light – nowhere near a pair of glasses.

But Nintendo has shown imagination can beat processing power. What if they don't need a high-performance headset, and could be the first produce something genuinely light and comfortable, which anyone could easily wear, which could bring technically rudimentary yet Nintendo-grade innovative fun to players' own spaces? Of course I can't know whether they're working on something like that, but I think they're the one company who could make it successful in the way they once made cheap accelerometers successful.

In the meantime: enjoy the Switch, folks. (And I'll enjoy the Wii U.)