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Nintendo will offer a taste of the games coming to Switch in a Nintendo Direct on Wednesday, it revealed on a tweet Tuesday. The Feb. 8 livestream will include "roughly 40 minutes of information" about titles launching in the first half of 2023, a lineup that includes the highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
When does the Nintendo Direct start?
The Nintendo Direct livestream starts at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, which converts to 10 p.m. GMT or 9 a.m. Thursday AEST.
How to watch the Nintendo Direct
The event will be streaming from Nintendo's YouTube channel. We've embedded the YouTube link above, so you can watch right here.
What games will Nintendo show during its Nintendo Direct?
The majority of Switch owners are eagerly awaiting The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to 2017's Breath of the Wild, which got a trailer during last September's Nintendo Direct. It's out on May 12, so we can expect details about that game's story and gameplay mechanics.
Pikmin 4 is scheduled for release in 2023, so Nintendo will likely give us a look at the colorful real-time strategy game and narrow down the release date.
Nintendo will likely reveal the new release date for Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, the remake collection featuring two Game Boy Advance turn-based strategy games. It was originally scheduled to come out last April, but got delayed due to the war in Ukraine.
It could reveal details of an expansion or update for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, since those games are expected to add compatibility with the Pokemon Home mobile app soon.
Other upcoming titles include Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe (an enhanced port of the 2011 Wii game) and Octopath Traveler 2 on Feb. 24, as well as Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon on March 17.
We'll probably get hints about Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's next batch of downloadable tracks, since wave 4 should be arriving soon, as well as updates about when Mario Party 3, Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2, 1080 Snowboarding and Excitebike 64 will be added to the N64 retro library in the Switch Online subscription service.
It's also possible the company will look at upcoming non-Switch projects: its first US Super Nintendo World theme park opens next week and the Super Mario Bros. movie hits theaters on April 7.
People anticipating Metroid Prime 4 probably shouldn't get their hopes up though -- it's been nearly six years since that game was announced and we have yet to see gameplay.
Could a Switch successor be revealed during the Nintendo Direct?
It's unlikely that Nintendo will take the focus away from Tears of the Kingdom and other upcoming games, but we'll likely see the company's next console soon. The Switch will be six years old in March, and the technical issues of games like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet highlight the aging hardware (along with Sony and Microsoft's technically superior PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X competitor consoles).
The Switch sold 122.55 million units overall as of the end of 2022, the company announced its latest earnings report on Tuesday, putting it ahead of the PS4 and making it the third best-selling console of all time (only the DS and PS2).
Despite hitting this milestone, Bloomberg noted Nintendo missed console sales targets toward the year's end. Company boss Shuntaro Furukawa didn't answer questions about its next console, it noted. Last year, VGC reported that Furukawa said that a smooth transition to the next generation of hardware is "a major focus" for the company -- we can expect to get a firmer sense of its plans this year.