New Smash Bros. Not Coming Until 2028, Says Prominent Leaker

NateTheHate revealed in his latest podcast that a new Super Smash Bros. title won't arrive anytime soon—2028 is the earliest window for an announcement, with the actual release likely landing in 2029 or later.

That timeline tests the patience of completionists. Smash isn't an open-world game in the traditional sense, but every fighter and stage functions like territory to master—you map out combo routes, learn stage hazards, hunt down easter eggs. Unlocking the full roster in Ultimate took me over sixty hours, and watching that character select screen fill up felt identical to lighting up towers in Zelda.

A three-year wait suggests Nintendo might be planning something substantial. Ultimate crammed in 89 fighters plus stages, music tracks, and spirits that added up to theme-park-level content. If the new entry targets Switch 2 hardware, the technical upgrade opens possibilities—larger arenas, more complex terrain interactions, maybe multi-tiered stages with vertical depth. But hardware improvements are standard procedure for console transitions; whether the content depth scales up is what actually matters.

Nintendo hasn't made any official moves yet—the project hasn't even entered a public development phase. That level of secrecy is typical for the company, but for players it's like staring at a completely blacked-out map. You know something's there, but you can't make out any contours. Community speculation about the roster is already running wild, with names ranging from Splatoon 3's Inklings to Xenoblade Chronicles 3's protagonists, though these discussions lack any factual basis.

Three years isn't unusually long for a fighting game—Street Fighter 6 took roughly four years from conception to launch, and Smash has to juggle cross-IP licensing and balance tuning on top of that. If Nintendo positions the new title as a Switch 2 flagship, a 2029 release makes sense: give the console a year to establish its install base, then deploy Smash to capture the core audience. But that also means veterans will be grinding Ultimate's existing stages and strategies for three more years, likely until genuine fatigue sets in.