On Jan. 13, 2020, Chinese developer of Genshin Impact, miHoYo, officially announced their free-to-play game for PS4/PS5 and Microsoft Windows would be coming to the Nintendo Switch “soon.” Shortly after the announcement, the COVID-19 pandemic began and largely halted production and development within the video game industry, especially in China due to the country’s zero-covid policies. Due to this, and a hiatus of updates from miHoYo, many of the game’s fans speculated and assumed the Nintendo Switch port for Genshin Impact had been abandoned. However, as of yesterday, miHoYo confirmed to GoNintendo that development for the Nintendo Switch release of Genshin Impact is still ongoing.

GoNintendo decided to directly reach out to miHoYo, largely due to the popularity of the rumors that the developer had scrapped its Nintendo Switch efforts. The rumors mainly began because a “handful” of official updates and trailers had excluded the mention of the Nintendo Switch in their descriptions. In response to GoNintendo’s inquiry for confirmation, miHoYo told GoNintendo:

The Switch version is still in development, and we will release more information as we progress further along.

According to GoNintendo, this was all the Genshin Impact team told them and no further updates were given.

Due to the upheaval of COVID-19 and lack of updates on development, the release date for the Nintendo Switch version of Genshin Impact has yet to be announced. Some fans theorize that the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch is what is causing the long delay, but it could be a myriad of factors. For instance, while not super revolutionary, the newer Nintendo Switch OLED does provide better technical advancements to the Nintendo Switch, so it perhaps may not be due to technical limitations. Despite what is causing the setback, given that no release date nor future plans were provided by miHoYo to GoNintendo, it may hint that some large difficulty is hurting the development and that no promises can be made.