People have been awaiting the arrival of whatever came after the Nintendo Switch for years. So the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct on April 2nd felt euphoric. Mario Kart World looks incredible! Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077 can run on this thing! The Joy-Con 2 can double as a mouse! There’s a new FromSoft game exclusive to the Switch 2?!
Fans were riding high. But even through my joyful delirium—a new Hyrule Warriors!—I noticed with an air of ominousness that price tags were completely missing from the presentation. Then we all went online and saw the awful truth: the Nintendo Switch 2 is $450. Worse still, Mario Kart World is a gut-punching $80. Donkey Kong Bananza is a still-shocking $70. Both are more expensive if you want the physical edition.
Which leaves all of us going: “…WHAT?!“
Can we at least justify the cost of the console?
The dramatic price increase of the Nintendo Switch 2 feels shocking because, since its beginnings, Nintendo has prided itself as the budget-friendly gaming company. Their consoles and handhelds were usually cheaper than their competitors’. (Example: the PS1 was $299, while the N64 was $200.)
One reason the Switch 2 feels so expensive is because original Nintendo Switch launched in 2017 for $299.99. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $390. By contrast, the Nintendo Switch 2 is launching at $450. That’s the same price as a PS5. The directly comparable version of the Steam Deck—with the same LCD screen and 256 GB of memory—costs $399.
Prices have gone up, but people’s paychecks largely haven’t—or, at the very least, they haven’t gone up proportionately. So the price of the Switch 2 is a bummer.
Still, I think the console price itself is reasonable. When docked, it can run 4K when plugged in and is powerful enough to run CPU-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077. But unlike the PS5 or Steam Deck, the beauty of the Switch is that it’s both a docked console and a handheld. Sony asks you to shell out an additional $199 to play your PS5 games on a handheld contraption that still requires your PS5 to be physically running back home. It’s doable, sure, but the Switch’s strength is that it’s all streamlined.
At worse, the Switch 2’s cost feels like it’s in line with industry standards. The fact that there’s a significantly cheaper, region-locked version releasing in Japan is … challenging, but at least makes sense as an anti-scalper, anti-yen devaluation tactic. To me, the bigger issue is the games.
What about the games?
The internet collectively fainted when we all excitedly went to Mario Kart World‘s website and saw that the game’s price is … $80. If you want a physical edition, that’ll be $90, please.
We all had to fan ourselves when The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released at $70 instead of the usual $60. But $80?! Eighty whole dollars?! For Mario Kart?! Really?!
Donkey Kong Bananza is $70, which clues us in that $70 might be the new base price of Switch 2 games. Again, this comes as the cost of goods is rising at a faster rate than peoples’ income. Raising the base price of a console, which requires hardware, can at least be explained. But a digital copy of a game? Plenty of people—myself included—are having existential crises about whether we will be able to afford to continue being gamers.
Granted, Nintendo is one of exceedingly few game companies which has not had layoffs during the past two years. If that extra ten dollars enables people to keep their jobs … fine. That, I could swallow. I would deeply appreciate the transparency, though.
So yes, the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 and its games is enough to put sweat on any gamers’ brow. For the console, at least, it makes sense. The games, though? Rough stuff.