Despite being a “central event” of their year, and having attended every year in the past, Nintendo will be skipping Gamescom in 2024. Gamescom is the largest gaming convention in the world by attendance, so Nintendo’s absence will be felt. Many have looked towards the event as a potential showcase ground for the Nintendo Switch 2, having been rumored to have been shown behind closed doors to journalists during the 2023 event, this no longer seems to be the case.
A Nintendo of Europe spokesperson talked to German website Games Wirtschaft, stating:
Gamescom 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.
This decision possibly plays into rumors that Nintendo has delayed its Switch successor out of the 2024 window, into 2025. It is possible that plans for the event would have focused either third-party support for the rumored platform or potentially even for focus on first-party games that had planned to be announced earlier at a Nintendo-centric event focused on their next-generation hardware. If this is something to go off of, we might not get an official announcement till August or later. The Nintendo Switch itself was unveiled on October 16th, 2016.
In multiple statements, Nintendo has stated they would be attending various other events this year. Nintendo did attend Pax East earlier this year, with their attendance at the rest of the Pax events throughout the year also expected. The biggest question mark on their schedule though is if they will attend the Summer Games Fest, or IGN Live in the summer, both of which take the place of the now-defunct E3 convention. Nintendo, while still attending E3 in the years building up to multiple skipped years, was the first to distance their events from the convention, holding a Treehouse event and Direct instead of an on-stage announcement show.
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