I think that a new Zelda is years away, but the Switch’s successor will come out next year or early 2025 at the latest.
I do expect Mario Kart 9 and a new 3D Mario at launch.
I think they’ll release a Tears of the Kingdom “Deluxe” a few months later (similar to what they did with Mario Kart 8 on the Switch). Enough people want a higher-res TotK that it’s worth making, but banking on an upscaled port as a launch title isn’t something they’d do.
There was also a leak about a year ago that claimed that this game was done, playtesting results were awful, and they were trying to figure out what to do with it.
When they silently dropped a trailer 2 weeks before release and a few days before a Nintendo Direct, I was convinced the leak was true, and that this would be a disaster.
“Okay” reviews are a huge surprise.
The weird thing is that it seems late for Nintendo to still be working on R&D for the Switch 2. This is probably less than a year from announcement. At this point, I would expect them to be hammering out agreements with suppliers, so the hardware should be more-or-less done.
Then again, I have no idea what the timeline is like for console development.
Assuming any of this is legit:
Is it possible that the “Switch 2” has a hybrid version like the Switch, a handheld version like the Switch Lite, and a home console version? (Or even just hybrid and home console versions, with a handheld to come later?)
These could all run the same software with very similar hardware, but the home console would either be cheaper or offer higher resolutions and/or framerates than the docked hybrid console.
Customers might get confused, but this is arguably more straightforward than the current lineup.
The downside is that developers would need to handle 3 different configurations (handheld, docked, and home).
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one of the last big releases on Switch.
We know that the Switch’s successor won’t be out until FY2024, so April 2024 at the earliest. There’s also some indication that Nintendo is going to build a bit of a stockpile before launching to reduce scalping. I think that fall 2024 is the earliest realistic launch window. Even then, it’s possible that Nintendo keeps releasing games for the Switch after the next console launch (as Sony has kept the PS4 going post-PS5).
Nintendo has a packed release schedule through November 2023 and then there’s nothing. The only confirmed games with no release date are Luigi’s Mansion 2, Metroid Prime 4, and the Princess Peach game. It’s possible that those all come out next year for the Switch.
I was about to say, Nintendo seems to already be doing this, having learned their lesson from the Metroid Prime 4 debacle.
After the MP4 reset, I think Tears of the Kingdom is the only Nintendo game that was announced more than a few months ahead of its release. They even started shadow-dropping games this year.
Some of the changes in GPLv3 seem to address this type of behavior. There might be some narrow gaps that Red Hat is taking advantage of, but the folks at GNU at least made things harder.
Got it.
I don’t see how that could comply with the terms of the GPL.
They might also be banking on GPLv3 contributors being unable/unwilling to take them to court. The Linux kernel is GPLv2, and its contributors are probably more of a legal threat than anything else in RHEL.
Frankly, I’m more concerned about the precedent this sets for the GPL.
If Red Hat can do this, then there’s nothing (legally) preventing every other megacorp from ending public contributions to Linux and other GPL projects, forking them, and releasing them under restrictive contractual terms.
Granted, not everyone would take their code private. Microsoft and Apple make some contributions to BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software even though they are not required to. However, I think we’d miss out on quite a lot of FOSS development.
What stops one person with a free account from mirroring the source?
Then he has never been the victim of a cyber-attack!