Wednesday’s Nintendo Direct will focus on upcoming third-party releases

The subsequent Nintendo Direct is scheduled for this Wednesday, the corporate simply introduced. It is being billed as a “companion showcase,” with Nintendo saying it’s going to showcase Swap video games coming within the first half of this 12 months from “our publishing and improvement companions.” It’s going to kick off on February 21, vivid and early at 9AM ET.

Whereas Nintendo holds these showcases regularly, this one is doubtlessly extra vital than standard. Final week, Microsoft made an expected but still surprising announcement that it will start bringing a few of its titles to “different consoles,” a phrase that is arduous to not interpret as video games coming to the Swap (and Sony’s PlayStation 5 as properly).

Nintendo says it’s going to be a 25-minute presentation, so there’s an opportunity we’ll hear about some video games from different builders, as properly. However we’re all anticipating to see some information about what video games Microsoft goes to deliver over to the Swap. Microsoft solely stated that it will be bringing 4 video games to different platforms however did not identify them; the newest rumors cite Hello-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo and Gears of Conflict as seemingly choices to make the transfer.

This comes at a time when Nintendo does not have a number of its personal first-party video games scheduled for the platform (that we all know of, anyway). There’s additionally the looming specter of a Swap 2 console; stories simply stated that the {hardware} is getting pushed back to 2025 after an anticipated launch in some unspecified time in the future this 12 months.