Nintendo falls 6% after it delays highly anticipated sequel to Zelda franchise until spring 2023

• Nintendo stock fell as much as 6% on Wednesday after the company delayed its Zelda sequel.
• The unnamed follow-up to "Breath of the Wild" was expected to be released on the Nintendo Switch later this year.
• The game has since been delayed until spring 2023 as Nintendo further develops the game.

Nintendo stock fell as much as 6% on Wednesday after the video-game company announced a delay to its highly anticipated Zelda sequel.

The company said the unnamed follow-up to "Breath of the Wild," which was announced in 2019, won't be released until spring of 2023. The game had originally been planned for a 2022 release, though Nintendo never set a hard date.

"For those of you who have been looking forward to a release this year, we apologize... In order to make this game's experience something special, the entire development team is continuing to work diligently on this game, so please wait a while longer," Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma said in a video announcement released on Tuesday.

The game, which is being developed for the hand-held Nintendo Switch console, has the potential to drive hardware sales and reach blockbuster figures, as previous iterations of the game have done for both the Switch and older Nintendo consoles.

That sales boost would have been welcomed by Nintendo in 2022 given that video-game software and hardware sales growth has been steadily decelerating from the highs experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those declines were also seen for both Xbox and Sony, which are still in the early innings of their next-generation console launches of the Xbox Series S and the Playstation 5, respectively. For now, Nintendo has indicated further iterations of its Switch console, which was originally released in 2017.

With rumors swirling that the Nintendo Switch 2 could be released some time in 2023, the delay of the Zelda game until then could line up with a blockbuster launch of a potentially new console and help drive hardware sales.

Despite Wednesday's decline, shares of Nintendo are still up 10% year-to-date.