7 hours ago
The New Nintendo Is Here. It's Missing Something Crucial That the Previous Ones Have All Had.
Of the many reasons Nintendo has flourished during its four-decade run in the video game industry—a Pixar-like dedication to quality, a memorable roster of mascots, an inherent creative brightness that cuts against the grimdark fantasies promulgated by other franchises—the company's prime advantage might be its commitment to affordability. The Nintendo Switch, a massively successful console that first made landfall in 2017, retailed for $299—a bargain compared with the $599 Xbox Series X and $699 PlayStation 5 Pro. Remember the Wii? The motion-controlled triumph that became all the rage in retirement homes during the mid-2000s? It was priced at $249, half as much as the lumbering PlayStation 3 which arrived one week prior. (It also included the eternal Wii Sports, bundled in the box, as a bonus.)
It's a strategy that has sent an enduring message to consumers. Nintendo might not flex the same graphical fidelity of its rivals—Sony and Microsoft may consistently boast more impressive technical specs—but families could expect to save money when they purchased the company's hardware. And, frankly, that's what's been on my mind most as I surveyed the launch of Nintendo's latest console last week. The long-awaited Switch 2 is here, and it weighs in at an eye-popping $449. Its marquee launch title? A new Mario Kart game that costs an unprecedented $80.
The Switch 2, it should be said, has an impressive design. Nintendo has outfitted the console with a gorgeous LCD screen, robust internal storage, and a motherboard powerful enough to furnish its lineup of games in glistening 4K. If you are one of the millions of people curious about the next installments of The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, or Animal Crossing, it is easy to consider its inflated price tag as a genuinely worthwhile investment in your future. And yet, like every other piece of video game machinery that has debuted this decade, the Switch 2 isn't going to shift any paradigms, because we are rapidly approaching a ceiling of what is possible with a graphics card. In the 1990s, each new console release represented a watershed moment in the industry. The Nintendo 64 arrived in 1996 with a suite of games rendered in 3D, leaps and bounds more impressive than the Super Nintendo, which imprisoned everything on-screen in a 2D plane. The justification for the cost was self-evident—a couple hundred bucks was more than worth it to unlock a whole new dimension.
The Switch 2, meanwhile, functions essentially like a prettier, svelter, and more efficient update to the previous generation of hardware. The price is dramatically outpacing the novelty of the technology, and that discrepancy has been noticed by the gaming public. During the rollout of the Switch 2, when Nintendo hosted livestreams showcasing its upcoming 2025 catalog, the chat box on the side of the screen billowed up with the same message repeated ad nauseam: 'DROP THE PRICE.'
It is hard to get a straight answer out of Nintendo about why its hardware has suddenly gotten so expensive, but it must be said that the company unveiled the Switch 2 on the afternoon of Donald Trump's so-called 'liberation day'—on which he announced a barrage of ill-conceived tariffs to be levied on the global population. Nintendo, recoiling from the chaos, briefly suspended preorders of its new consoles 'in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.' The announced price tag would eventually go unchanged, because Trump, as the saying goes, chickened out, but the impact may not be over: It wasn't long before Nintendo also warned of 'price adjustments' on accessories.
The United States' self-inflicted financial uncertainty may also have already been factored into the Switch 2's retail calculus. That's certainly what industry analysts think. Joost van Dreunen, who studies the business of video games at New York University, told IGN in April that with the higher price, 'Nintendo appears to be building in a buffer against these potential trade barriers,' while Piers Harding-Rolls, who studies the gaming market at Ampere Analysis, speculated that the company 'probably had a range of pricing for the US market in play up until the last minute due to the uncertainty on import tariffs.' Nintendo, naturally, has remained publicly neutral about the issue. 'Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as a part of the cost and incorporate them into the price,' said Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa during a fiscal year report in May. (Given how open-ended Furukawa's statement was, I'm not surprised some experts believe that the Switch 2 might get even more expensive if Trump reintroduces portions of his tariff program, especially his original planned 46 percent tariff on Vietnam and 49 percent tariff on Cambodia, the countries where the company does much of its Switch manufacturing.)
To be clear, Nintendo isn't the only heavy hitter jacking up its prices. Video game development is taking longer and growing steadily more expensive, and that has caused all the power brokers in the industry to print out new price tags. Just yesterday, Microsoft showed off The Outer Worlds 2, due out in October, which is a madcap sci-fi RPG that will also be the company's first $80 game. (For context, the average video game cost $60 for much of the 21st century. That number jumped to $70 in 2020, and five years later, norms are shifting again.) Similarly, remember that Xbox Series X I mentioned earlier? The one clocking in at $599? That's actually a recent phenomenon. When the console launched in 2020, it was a hundred bucks cheaper. The tech hasn't changed, but those ominous 'market conditions' certainly have, so Microsoft bumped up the cost earlier this year.
This is a pretty radical departure, and it can't be explained away by simple inflation. Not long ago, video game hardware decreased in price over time, once it became sufficiently outpaced by flashier tech. But the titans of this industry have become increasingly responsive to fluctuations in the supply chain, and those old patterns have fallen by the wayside. The only question, it seems, that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are asking of their consumers is how much they're willing to pay. If that shift in philosophy turns their consoles into a luxury? Then so be it.
Last weekend, I re-created a ritual I've savored every summer since I started playing video games. A few friends came over to fire up the latest Nintendo, down some beers, and enjoy a rousing evening of Mario Kart. The latest entry in the series hasn't altered the formula much; This is still the crowd-pleasing racing game it was in 1998, and 2007, and 2021. Gamers and nongamers alike instinctually internalized the controls, and together we jostled for position on the circuit, creating fleeting rivalries with those homing red shells. It left me a little melancholy. To think such a simple joy has become a premium experience? A new Mario Kart game is like manna from heaven for college dorms and bachelor pads. But today broke twentysomethings will need to scrounge up half a grand for the price of admission. I suppose that's just what life is like in 2025, when everything—rent, groceries, concert tickets, gym memberships—leaves us feeling gouged. No leisure goes unpunished anymore, and given the Trump economy's gloomy forecast, I fear it'll get worse before it gets better.
