Nintendo has confirmed it won’t be attending Gamescon 2024.
The Japanese gaming juggernaut, which has consistently attended the convention — in which the industry’s biggest players gather to showcase their upcoming projects — has now announced it won’t be present at the event this year “after careful consideration from all perspectives.”
“Gamescon is a great event, and each year we evaluate whether Nintendo should participate or not,” a Nintendo spokesperson told Eurogamer.
“After careful consideration from all perspectives, we’ve made the decision not to be present at Gamescon 2024. Players will have opportunities to try out Nintendo Switch games at other events throughout the year,” continued the spokesperson.
A separate spokesperson added that the company considered Gamescon to be a “central event” in their calendar, but opted to miss the convention in Cologne, Germany, which is set to take part in August 2024.
“Gamescon is a central event in Nintendo’s event calendar. This year, however, after careful consideration, we decided against taking part in Cologne. Instead, players can try out the games for Nintendo Switch as part of other Germany-wide events,” they said to the German site Games Wirtschaft.
Nintendo’s decision to skip this year’s Gamescon is likely due to the company wanting to put all its efforts into the highly-anticipated Switch 2, which is expected to launch at some point in 2025.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, the upcoming console will receive a major performance boost from a new NVIDA Tegra T239 chipset that will allow the device to bridge the power gap with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
Previous rumors from the Japanese publication Nikkei also alleged that the Switch 2 would come with an eight-inch LCD rather than the more vivid OLED screen seen on Nintendo’s 2021 device, complete with 64GB of internal storage and a $400 price tag.
