According to comments made by Furukawa during Nintendo’s recent shareholder Q&A, the plan is to utilise the existing Nintendo Account system to make the jump to the next generation as smooth as possible for customers. Here’s part of what Nintendo’s president had to say, courtesy of a translation by Twitter user Genki:
Shuntaro Furukawa: “As for the transition from Nintendo Switch to the next generation machine, we want to do as much as possible in order to smoothly transition our customers, while utilizing the Nintendo Account.”
Rumours of next Switch started from 2018, if I recall correctly, so I am just going to ignore that. Don’t care much about leaks and rumours anyway.
Yeah, people are saying that, but I don’t think it means the opposite. If next console was close, Ubisoft could have just waited, but they thought “Na, the wait’s too long, let’s release it now!”.
Also, they probably didn’t have that discussion just before game launch, they probably had it somewhere during early-to-mid development. It would be weird if Nintendo said nothing while Ubisoft was developing the game (with their input on characters etc.), and then when they were ready to launch Nintendo said, “Why are you launching it, wait!”