gaming

Things just cost more now

In justifying the $450 price of the Switch 2, Nintendo executives predictably pointed to the system’s upgraded hardware specs, as well as new features like GameChat and mouse mode. “As you add more technology into a system, especially in this day and age, that drives additional cost.” Nintendo Vice President of Player & Product Experience Bill Trinen told Polygon.

That said, Trinen also pointed toward rising prices in the wider economy to justify the $150 jump between Switch and Switch 2 pricing. “We’re unfortunately living in an era where I think inflation is affecting everything,” Trinen said.

Trinen isn’t wrong about that; the $299 early adopters paid for a Switch in 2017 is worth about $391 in today’s dollars, according to the BLS CPI calculator. But for customers whose own incomes may have stayed flat over that time, the 50 percent jump in nominal pricing from Switch to Switch 2 may be hard to swallow in a time of increasing economic uncertainty.

“Obviously the cost of everything goes up over time, and I personally would love if the cost of things didn’t go up over time,” Trinen told IGN. “And certainly there’s the cost of goods and things that factor into that, but we try to find the right appropriate price for a product based on that.”

Is $80 the new $70?

Talk of inflation extended to Trinen’s discussion of why Nintendo decided to sell first-party Switch 2 games for $70 to $80. “The price of video games has been very stable for a very long time,” Trinen told Polygon. “I actually have an ad on my phone that I found from 1993, when Donkey Kong Country released on the SNES at $59. That’s a very, very long time where pricing on games has been very stable…”

Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.

“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. “Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”

Nintendo announced launch details for the Switch 2 on Wednesday morning, just hours before Trump’s afternoon “Liberation Day” press conference announcing the biggest increase in import duties in modern US history. Those taxes on practically all goods imported into the United States are set to officially go into effect on April 9, the same day Nintendo had planned to roll out Switch 2 preorders for qualified customers.

Welcome to day 2 of Nintendo Treehouse Live’s “drop the price” stream

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— AmericanTruckSongs10 (@ethangach.bsky.social) April 4, 2025 at 10: 14 AM

The delay in the preorder date comes as outspoken gamers online are making plenty of noise over the Switch 2’s higher-than-expected $450 price point and over Switch 2 software pricing falling in the $70 to $80 range. Nintendo’s promotional “Treehouse” streams showing Switch 2 gameplay have been inundated with a nonstop torrent of chatters demanding the company “DROP THE PRICE.”

Yet today’s announcement suggests that Nintendo might need to “assess” whether even a $450 price is feasible given the additional taxes the company will now have to pay to import systems manufactured in countries like China and Vietnam into the United States. Alternatively, Nintendo could eat the cost of any tariffs and sell its console hardware at a loss, as it has in the past, in an attempt to make that money back in software sales.

When Nintendo finally officially revealed the Switch 2 in January, one of our major unanswered questions concerned whether games designed for the original Switch would see some form of visual or performance enhancement when running on the backward-compatible Switch 2. Now, Nintendo-watchers are pointing to a fleeting mention of “Switch 2 Edition games” as a major hint that such enhancements are in the works for at least some original Switch games.

The completely new reference to “Switch 2 Edition games” comes from a Nintendo webpage discussing yesterday’s newly announced Virtual Game Cards digital lending feature. In the fine print at the bottom of that page, Nintendo notes that “Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive games and Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games can only be loaded on a Nintendo Switch 2 system [emphasis added].”

The specific wording differentiating these “Switch 2 Edition” games from “Switch 2 exclusives” suggests a new category of game that is compatible with the original Switch but able to run with enhancements on the Switch 2. But it’s currently unclear what Switch games will get “Switch 2 Edition” releases or how much developer work (if any) will be needed to create those new versions.

We’ve seen this before

Nintendo is no stranger to the idea of single game releases that work differently across different hardware. Back in the days of the Game Boy Color, developers could create special “Dual Mode” cartridges that ran in full color on the newer handheld or in regular grayscale on the original Game Boy. Late-era Game Boy cartridges could also be coded with special enhancements that activated when played on a TV via the Super Game Boy adapter—Taito even memorably used this feature to include a complete SNES edition of Space Invaders on a Game Boy cartridge.