BODY: One of the last non-gaming apps on the original Nintendo Switch is heading for the exit. Dwango announced on October 13 that the Switch version of Niconico — Japan's long-running, comment-scrolling video platform — will shut down on March 31, 2027, and that no Switch 2 version is in the works.
The app arrived on Switch in 2017, back when Nintendo was still quietly building out a modest media layer for the console. It was free, it let users pull up Niconico videos and live streams on the living-room TV, and for a certain slice of Japanese users it turned the Switch into a casual second screen for variety streams, game broadcasts, and the platform's famously dense wall of overlaid viewer comments. Dwango has not detailed a replacement path beyond the obvious one: the browser and mobile apps.
The blunter part of the announcement is the Switch 2 line. Dwango explicitly stated there is no planned support for the newer hardware, which lands the app in the same bucket as most of the Switch's video services — a category Nintendo has shown little appetite for rebuilding on its successor. Switch 2 launched in June 2025 with a notably thinner app shelf than its predecessor's late-life lineup.
Users still on Switch have roughly five and a half months of runway. After March 31, the app stops functioning; accounts and paid Niconico Premium subscriptions are unaffected elsewhere.
The insider take
Niconico occupies a strange place in Tokyo's media landscape right now: culturally foundational and commercially squeezed. It invented the danmaku comment style that Bilibili later scaled to hundreds of millions of users, and it remains the home platform for Vocaloid producers, utaite singers, and a particular strain of internet-native Japanese humor. But the June 2024 cyberattack on parent company Kadokawa knocked the service offline for roughly two months, and the audience that drifted to YouTube and TikTok during that gap largely did not drift back. Shuttering a TV-adjacent app on aging hardware is not a dramatic retreat — it is housekeeping. The telling detail is that nobody at Dwango seems to have made a case for building it again on Switch 2.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).