Last month was a pretty big month for Nintendo. They dropped a whole new direction for us of all kinds of fun new reveals. But nothing too out there. What’s weird is that the leak I mentioned in the title actually comes from the Pokemon Presents that happened about a week ago.

Now, when I hear the word leak, I’m thinking fake instantly and I know a lot of you feel the same. This is true for so many leaks out there. But this one actually seems to be accurate. For a start, they correctly shared pretty much everything. That was going to happen within the Pokemon Presents days before it actually happened and that’s not the interesting part. It’s what they shared at the very end of this leak that concerns all of Nintendo and especially their biggest games like Animal Crossing.

This supposed leaker works at an outsourcing company for Pokemon and they’ve been working on the latest DLC, which we’ll be releasing this year for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. At the very end of their league, they mentioned that they’ve been working on a graphics enhancement patch for new Nintendo Switch models, which will release alongside the second DLC.

Then, in a follow-up reply, they actually elaborated on this, showing that this would be Nintendo’s next gen console, which is a successor to the Switch. If this is true and it’s seeming like it is. Then, it’s an enormous piece of news, which will affect a lot of different Nintendo games, which have been waiting for new releases. Think about the new Metroid game and maybe the sequel to Super Mario Odyssey and of course potentially a new Animal Crossing release, as well.

Now, there’s a lot of speculation about what this new model would be. Nintendo Switch just celebrated sixth anniversary, so we’re definitely heading to the end of this particular console I feel.

Of course, a big thing that a lot of Animal Crossing fans know is that Nintendo doesn’t really release two main Animal Crossing games on the same system. But if a new system or effectively a new improved version of the Switch is arriving sometime in 2024, then the opportunity for a new Animal Crossing game would become available. After all, it’ll have been four years at that point since New Horizons, which is a standard amount of time the Animal Crossing games usually release in with the exception of New Horizons itself.

Given that Animal Crossing is a major system seller and New Horizons is one of Nintendo’s biggest games of all time, it seems fairly likely that they would want a new one to release alongside a new console as that would boost sales drastically. Even if it doesn’t release in 2024, I think we’d start seeing teasers and trailers for the future for sure, like they did with New Horizons to build excitement with the huge crowd of people, who brought the original switch purely to play New Horizons.

I’ve seen a lot of you saying that 2025 would be a good year for a new Animal Crossing game. Maybe in that year you will experience more game content and interesting ACNH Items. And honestly, I think this makes a lot of sense. So, we definitely learn about it alongside a new model of the Switch in 2024 or whatever this successor is.

Now, if this is effectively an upgraded Switch and they’re working on a graphical enhancement patch for existing games like Scala and Violet. It’s possible New Horizons could get the same treatment, which might be interesting too personally at that point into 2024. I just prefer a totally new game.

But if New Horizons got some love again, I don’t think that would be a bad thing. It seems likely from this league that we’d be able to play Switch games on this new system, so New Horizons would be included in that even if it’s not graphically improved. I’m sure in some way, the experience would be better though on a new system. I think it’s safe to say that from a business point of view Nintendo would do something to encourage the New Horizons crowd to purchase their new console, even now they still use New Horizons to sell their online services.

They could also use this as a way to tide Animal Crossing fans over until the next main game, just like they did with the huge welcome Amiibo update for New Leaf back in the day.

Right now, this is all speculation in terms of Animal Crossing and the other major Nintendo games. But this leak about a new Nintendo system seems fairly certain at this point. I know a lot of you will be skeptical, especially after all the switch pro rumors that kind of went nowhere.

But given this person accurately sheds so many details from the new Pokemon DLC without anyone else knowing at all, it seems like at the very least Nintendo is planning what they have shared. We’ll just have to see if it actually comes to fruition or not.