Nintendo brought a new Metroid, Zelda, WarioWare, Advance Wars, and more to E3 2021, but its long-rumored Nintendo Switch Pro was absent. It makes perfect sense.
E3 2021 takes place June 12-15 as a re-imagined, all-virtual online event. Nintendo, Xbox, Bethesda, Square Enix, Sega, Bandai Namco, Ubisoft, Capcom, and others will deliver new video game announcements, trailers, release dates, and more. Some Nintendo fans and industry watchers came away from Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct perplexed that the company didn’t roll out a new Nintendo Switch model, which has been heavily rumored and reported for the better part of a year. Mere weeks before E3 2021 kicked off, Bloomberg reported that we could see the new 4K-ready “Switch Pro,” as some are calling it, before June 12 “to allow publishers to showcase their full range of Switch games.” Nintendo didn’t do that, of course, because Nintendo knows better than to showcase its next major hardware release at E3. The company seems to have learned that lesson a long time ago, in the wake of the disastrous E3 2012 reveal of the Wii U and the E3 2010 reveal of the Nintendo 3DS, which stumbled out of the gate so badly that Nintendo slashed the price of the handheld a few months after launch.
