Switch 2’s Price Increase Seals It: The Rules Have Changed

Switch 2’s Price Increase Seals It: The Rules Have Changed

Tech has hit a wall, but that doesn’t mean games can’t keep moving ahead.

By The LRG Team

We’ve all known it was coming, but you still hate to see it: Nintendo has announced a price change for its Switch 2 console, which debuted about a year ago.

“Ah, wonderful,” you think. “The one-year mark is always a perfect time to reduce a console’s price and bring in a bigger audience beyond those eager early adopters!”

Alas, that’s not how things work in the year 2026. Old-timers may recall the way that, say, Sony dropped the price of the original PlayStation from $299 to $199 in 1996, about nine months after its debut, in order to remain competitive against the upcoming Nintendo 64 and force Nintendo to rethink their console’s price. You may recall that 15 years later, Nintendo saw the 3DS struggling at retail and slashed the system’s price from $249 to $169 while offering early adopters a bunch of bonus software as a make-good. Here we are, another 15 years on from that. Time to continue that nice, consumer-friendly pattern, right?

Well, anyone hoping that the 15-year cycle would hold steady and was banking on a deep discount on Switch 2 hardware this summer has another thing coming. The Switch 2’s price change is going in the other direction: That $449 launch price is swinging up this time, with the sticker price slated to land at a bracing $499 in September.

© Nintendo

One could argue that Nintendo doesn’t need to cut the price of its system. Switch 2 is doing pretty great, having moved more than 19 million systems in less than a year. That amounts to the strongest first-year sales any game console has ever enjoyed, an especially remarkable feat given the way everyone seems to be pinching pennies as essentials like groceries and gas grow costlier by the day. And none of Nintendo’s competitors have announced a new system for release any time soon, so it’s not like Switch 2 needs to be made to look any more attractive in advance of a younger, prettier face.

But the more likely reality is that Nintendo actually does need to cut the price of its system. Sony recently raised the price on PlayStation 5 consoles by up to $100, despite its being six years old and entering what should be a console’s twilight years where prices plunge and little siblings inherit the machine to play candy-colored budget shovelware. And don’t even ask about the recent history of Xbox Series pricing.

Market pressures—the skyrocketing cost of shipping due to global fuel constraints, spurious consumer taxes, and the fact that AI companies bought up all of the planet’s computer components for their server farms—have jacked up the price of pretty much everything electronic. Nintendo arguably has greater holdout power against those pressures than their competition when it comes to console pricing; while most companies operate under the “razor and blade” model and sell their hardware cheap and make their profit on software, Nintendo has a reputation for always giving itself a healthy amount of margin on console sales to afford it some wiggle room, not to mention profit. But even the budget-friendly Japanese Switch 2 model (which Nintendo shipped exclusively in its home territory to help domestic customers compensate for the sagging yen) will be going up in price in a few months. Nintendo doesn’t flinch very often, so when they do, you can’t help but sit up and take notice.

This is the point at which armchair industry analysts stroke their chins, peer at their tea leaves and chicken bones, and attempt to prognosticate the future of video games. But the reality is that we’re in uncharted territory. For decades, the pricing of consoles was shaped by Moore’s Law, which posited that tech would double in power while dropping in price every few years. That evolution stalled out a while ago, once microchip design hit a point at which it became physically impossible (as in, literally limited by the actual laws of physics) for processors to shrink in size and therefore capacity. But really, do consoles need to become more powerful at this point? The days of radical leaps from, say, NES to Genesis or Genesis to PlayStation have long since ended. What new horizons are there to be conquered, now that we have ultra-high-definition 3D visuals? When was the last time a new console left you reeling in amazement the way that Nintendo 64 did when you jumped into the castle grounds of Super Mario 64 or Project Gotham Racing 3 did when you booted up your first session on an XBox 360 connected to an HDTV?

© Microsoft

And, you know, maybe that’s OK. Somewhere along the way, marketing hype cycles for new hardware became conflated with the basic concept of what video games should be about. But games don’t have to deliver radical new forms of interactivity, tech, or graphics in order to be fun. Nintendo just announced that Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, a game for the original Switch hardware that very definitely does not offer cutting-edge technology by any metric, has sold a staggering 3.8 million units in the space of two weeks. Dizzying tech tricks didn’t move those units; enthusiasm for a fun, unique, and frequently weird play experience did.

There’s a reason Limited Run keeps publishing classic games from old consoles (via Carbon releases) or even on old consoles (as legacy cartridges). Those games are still fun and interesting, even decades later. And the same holds true for modern-day releases. Those rising console prices may be a tough pill to swallow, but they also mean that you won’t see new hardware anytime soon. The suits who look at their financial charts seeking the dopamine hit of “line go up” may be breaking a sweat about it, but this moment in history offers a genuine opportunity for great things to happen for video games as an art form. Stable technological platforms give developers an opportunity to really dig into the hardware and push a system to its limit. And any artist knows that working within set limitations can often drive true creativity.

Those ghoulish DLSS 5 demos we saw a few weeks ago probably aren’t the future of gaming; turns out humans don’t really like peering down into the Uncanny Valley! It’s weird and gross! A much better scenario for gaming’s immediate future would be for publishers and developers to rein in budgets, commit to exploring new ideas, and deliver them on a quick schedule. Not everything can, or should, be a billion-dollar production.

Look back to the latter days of classic consoles and think about how incredible those experiences were. Think Battletoads and Kirby’s Adventure, which squeezed every drop of power out of the NES.  Visualize Gunstar Heroes for Genesis and Yoshi’s Island for Super NES. Think back to Vagrant Story on PlayStation, or Persona 4 on PlayStation 2. All of those games debuted after a vastly more powerful next generation of consoles had arrived, and all of them were honestly far more entertaining and impressive than anything you could find on the newer systems at the time. It takes a little time for tech to mature and creators to get a handle on things. This age of “no new tech” seems like a perfect time for everyone to settle in and get back to the business of creating new, cool, and not necessarily cutting-edge experiences. The breakout success of Capcom’s Pragmata over the past week or two suggests that players are hungry for fresh experiences that don’t necessarily strain the upper limits of production budgets. We’re eager to see more of that.

© Capcom