In short, Metroid Prime 4 is likely a long way out. And by then, who knows if the Nintendo Switch will even be Nintendo’s go-to platform? Perhaps, then, we’ll see Metroid Prime 4 in 2023 - although 2024 is more likely.

If Metroid Prime 4 had been in development since 2017 and Nintendo pulled the plug in early 2020, that may suggest that the company had a three-year development cycle in mind. Sometimes the series goes eight years without an entry sometimes it gets two entries in a single year. There’s no pattern to Metroid release times.

Where does that leave Metroid Prime 4’s release date? The series timeline up until this point doesn’t necessarily help that much. This is good news for longtime fans, as Retro Studios developed the first three Metroid Prime games, all of which fell somewhere between “well-received” and “beloved.” But it’s also potentially bad news, since it means that a game with at least three years of development time had to jettison all progress and start again.

Download metroid prime 4 announcement