The Nintendo Switch 2 has spun the gaming world around this week, with excitement and joy mixed in with gasps of exasperation. Why the exasperation? Well, it’s partly because of the price. The Nintendo Switch 2 is set to be the most expensive Nintendo hardware of all time, coming in at £395.99/$449.99/€469.99 for the console itself, or £429.99 / $449.99 /€509.99 for a bundle with Mario Kart World.
Based on the reaction from certain parts of the internet and the wider world, it’s clear that people were hoping for it to be closer to the price of the original Switch, but there’s a variety of reasons why it’s not. In further bad news for price-sensitive gamers in the US, it might actually get worse.
As a starting point, we need to talk about inflation. Inflation, rather than just being for balloons, is an economic effect wrapped up in the tracking of increases in average prices. They look at general goods – milk, bread, etc. – and see how much they were in the same month last year, with the percentage increase setting the inflation figure for that month. Inflation in the UK is 3% while it’s 2.8% in the US, so a pint of milk costs 3% more now than it did in April last year, and that impact is felt much stronger when compared over longer periods of time.
What drives inflation? This isn’t the place for an essay on economics, but increases to wages are the main driver, as this then affects every business and service, who then put their prices up to maintain their own growth and profits. So, in basic terms for milk’s case, the farm hands’ wages increase, the delivery drivers’ wages increase, the factory workers that package the milk wages increase, and then the workers in the shop that sell the milk wages increase. The result? The price of milk goes up.
This is a long way of saying that the price of things generally goes up. Electronics have often defied that upward trend over the past few decades, but the world-changing events of the last five years has put paid to that. On a baseline level, we shouldn’t expect the Switch 2 to cost the same price as the original Switch, which launched at £279.99/$299.99/€329.99 eight years ago – £280 in 2017 is now £367, when adjusting for inflation.
On top of that, this is a wholly improved console. While we don’t know the specifics of the chipset or RAM yet, it’s clearly a much more powerful device, capable of running titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy and Elden Ring, along with the addition of a larger 7.9″ screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, improved Joy-Con 2, 256GB storage, new microphone and chat functionality and an impressively useful mouse mode. The Switch 2 is a natural and clear evolution of one of the most successful consoles of all time.
Alongside those technical improvements, the handheld landscape has changed in the past seven years, with the rise of Valve’s Steam Deck, and Windows portables like the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. While we can’t be sure of the Switch 2’s hardware, it seems to be more proficient than the current Steam Deck model, which starts at £349 in the UK, with a lower resolution and plainer 60Hz LCD screen, and where you’d have to then buy a separate £69 dock for TV play, and some kind of controller on top of that.
Where the Steam Deck has the clear edge is on game pricing. Steam, and PC gaming in general, has always had lower software costs, and that’s emphasised here with Nintendo making bumping up the price of their top tier games to £66.99/€79.99 for digital versions of games like Mario Kart World, while physical copies are even more expensive again at £75. Nintendo are far from the only company to have increased prices in the last few years. £70 is now the baseline for an Assassin’s Creed, an EA Sports FC, a Call of Duty, and Nintendo are loosely matching that, and Sony has been all-in on double-dipping with PS5 remasters with paid upgrades from PS4, which Nintendo is now following with their Switch 2 Editions.
Game prices languished in a £50-60 region for a long, long time, even if it often didn’t feel like that thanks to retailers like Amazon, supermarkets and others often chopping the price of games after a couple months or even a few weeks, and with deep cuts that we always eagerly await during sales. Even Game Pass and PlayStation Plus have changed the perceived value of games. We’ve been living in a golden age where you could likely afford, and gain access to, a heap of games to play – probably more than you physically have time for – but this might be another indication that it’s coming to an end.
By splitting the pricing, though, this is a clear push to get people to go digital. You can spin that as cutting out the cost of producing a physical cartridge, or note it as a shrewd way to disincentivise the second hand market.
All of this is made worse by the stagnation of wages, which, while increasing, haven’t kept in line with inflation. Fundamentally, you can afford less than you used to. Does it suck? Yes, and the increase of game pricing is a huge burden for people in this hobby, but those blaming Nintendo for all of this need to turn their attention elsewhere.
Nintendo’s business model has always been not to lose money on their consoles and that’s clearly a policy that’s worked, when other manufacturers like Sega have fallen by the wayside. The increased price for the console and its games are nonetheless a bitter pill to swallow, especially when everything else in the world is also going up, from your weekly shopping to a pint down the pub.
US gamers will soon have to think about another thing on top of all that: tariffs. Donald Trump has gone to economic war with the rest of the world, placing or increasing tariffs on imports into North America. That’s caused such a huge wave in the global economy that Nintendo have postponed Switch 2 pre-orders in that territory. The genuine outcome could be that the Switch 2, and its physical games, cost even more than the announced price, and gamers are the ones who’ll likely end up out of pocket. This will affect PlayStation, Xbox and PC gamers just as much.
So, will I be getting a Switch 2? Yes. It feels like a natural competitor to the Steam Deck, and the pricing is in line with that. Nintendo also make amazing games that you can’t play elsewhere, and while I think the price of Mario Kart World is steep, the amount of playtime I’ll get out of it with my family and friends will still make it a sound investment. I totally understand anyone who isn’t going to make that jump quite yet. It hasn’t dimmed my excitement for a system that’s been talked and hypothesised about for a long time, but for some, it makes a Switch 2 a real luxury, and as a luxury it might not be as essential as its predecessor.
Will you be nabbing a Switch 2? Or do you think the prices too high?
