In a question and answer session with investors a few months before the Switch 2’s launch was detailed, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa mentioned that when it came to deciding the pricing for the Nintendo Switch 2, the long awaited successor to the beloved and globally bestselling hybrid machine, the company would keep affordability in mind, especially for younger and family demographics that comprise a big part of its audience. Nintendo has largely had a history of launching hardware that remains cheap enough for families to feel comfortable picking up – sometimes even multiples of. The declaration may have therefore felt obvious, but it was nonetheless an important barometer by which to judge the pricing of the console.
Now that the pricing for the Switch 2 has been revealed, along with a whole host of other details, however, it is difficult to not conclude that by Nintendo’s own stated metric, they have failed on this front at least. This is not to say the Switch 2 itself has failed, or that it will perform poorly – in fact, as we’ll discuss shortly, one of the reasons Nintendo has priced things the way it has is because of the confidence the company has that the system, its games, and its accessories are all guaranteed to do well. However, the Switch 2’s pricing strategy in particular, which is what we are discussing here, is where Nintendo seems to have fumbled here.
We’ll actually focus on the positives first. The Switch 2 hardware is actually fairly reasonably priced. While $399 would have been preferred by pretty much everyone, $449 inherently is not a bad price, especially given what the Switch 2 is offering (provided the recent delay in pre-orders for USA doesn’t increase the prices). A larger 1080p HDR enabled screen with 120FPS support and VRR compatibility, 4K support in docked mode, hardware that is capable of running current gen titles such as Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Borderlands 4, Star Wars Outlaws, Split Fiction, and even the technical showcase Cyberpunk 2077, robust 3D audio functionality, that mouse functionality built into the controllers, improvements to build and hardware quality across the board… $450 (if it doesn’t increase after the recent pre-orders delay for USA) it for the Switch 2 hardware itself is a reasonable asking price, even if it is a little bit more expensive than a lot of us would have liked.
It’s priced reasonably equivalently to other hardware that has similar specs – a lot of handhelds (PC or otherwise) that you may be able to get for cheaper will be completely unable to run a game like Star Wars Outlaws because they lack raytracing hardware and capabilities entirely, and Outlaws doesn’t have a raytracing-less build at all. That’s a game the Switch 2 runs with no trouble, apparently.
So the price of the hardware is competitive. And Nintendo has at least maintained full backward compatibility with all the Switch hardware, controllers, and accessories, as well as most games, that the massive audience of 150 million Switch owners may have accrued over the near decade of that system’s life. All of this is without question firmly in the “good” column as far as pricing decisions regarding the Switch 2 go.
But there are caveats even here – for example, the Switch 2 hardware is, by most reasonable metrics, priced competitively. But that still doesn’t mean it is affordable enough for that all important family and young demographic Nintendo’s President noted as being a critical consideration previously. At least right now, in 2025, with the global economy in distress, it is very hard to imagine the family that bought a cheap Switch Lite for their kid to play Pokemon and Animal Crossing will want to spend $450 (at a minimum!) on a Switch 2. And to be fair, I did compare the launch pricing of the Switch 2 with the pricing of the Switch Lite, which was a lower cost, pared back version of the Switch Nintendo launched a couple of years after the Switch had already been on the market.
Until the Switch Lite’s launch, there had been an argument to be made the original Switch itself was overpriced for the family demographic – at $300, it was more expensive than any Nintendo handheld had ever been until then (including the 3DS, which had been infamously rejected by the market at the far lower launch price of $250), and tied to be the most expensive launch price any Nintendo home console had had. Over time, however, Nintendo did make cheaper entry points into the ecosystem available – there is no reason to believe, for example, that a Switch 2 Lite won’t be releasing in 2026 or 2027, presumably timed to release around when Animal Crossing or the first Switch original Pokemon game is coming out.
But even if you bring the (admittedly reasonable, as mentioned) cost of the hardware down, you run into the absurdly high pricing everywhere else, in particular with the software on the Switch 2. To put it bluntly, Nintendo is really pushing the limits of what the market – even the vast, massive market that Nintendo enjoys – is willing to pay for access to Nintendo games. The cost of Mario Kart World, for example, is $80 USD. That’s an absurd, outrageous price – no game so far has had a standard edition launch at $80 in the United States.
There had been rumours and rumblings that Rockstar was looking at pricing GTA6 above the recently normalized $70 price point when it launches (allegedly later this year), but Nintendo sucker punched them and everyone else here. In at least some global markets (at the very least some continental European ones) Nintendo also seems to be charging more for physical copies of their games than digital – so in Europe, you are paying 80 Euros for a digital copy of Mario Kart World, and an eye watering 90 Euros for a physical one.
That’s… very high. Now Nintendo does offer a Switch 2 bundle for $500 which comes with this game, theoretically knocking $30 off of its price, which is nice, I suppose, and obviously incentivizes people to get that SKU rather than the cheaper hardware-only one instead. But it does highlight, again, just how shockingly high the baseline asking price here is to begin with.
High pricing is an issue across the board. Much like PlayStation, and unlike Xbox, Nintendo will offer paid upgrades for Switch 1 games to Switch 2 versions. You can, obviously, continue to play those games on a Switch 2 without paying anything extra, but if you want the Switch 2 functionality – the fancy new enhancements and features enabled by the Switch 2 – you will be paying for those upgrades.
And while this model is obviously following Sony’s model with the PS5, the pricing seems to be worse. PlayStation 4 to 5 upgrades for games such as Gran Turismo 7 were $10 – essentially covering the price differential between the $60 Sony charged for the PS4 version of a game, and the $70 it was charging for the PS5 version.
Nintendo is charging as much as $20 for these upgrades. Playing Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in 4K and 60FPS is a wonderful proposition, but the upgrades cost $20 each. Buying a Switch 2 enhanced copy of these games, which comes with all the upgrades out of the box? $80 USD, just like Mario Kart. Which, again, brings us back to the aforementioned high pricing. At least for the Zelda games, the Switch 2 enhancements will be available for free to anyone who is subscribed to the more expensive tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service – but if you want the enhancements for Super Mario Party Jamboree or Kirby and the Forgotten Land, you’re going to have to pay.
It’s all made worse because Nintendo games do not get price reductions. They go on temporary sales occasionally, but price drops are limited to 30-35% off their base price at best, and the games otherwise sell at full price even years after launch. In fact, Breath of the Wild, a Switch launch game, is still available for $60 in 2025, eight years after launch. So you can’t even count on Nintendo’s Switch 2 titles being available for reasonable discounted prices down the line – that simply doesn’t happen.
And over the last few months, Nintendo has also removed customer-friendly options that could have helped mitigate the pricing of these games a little – such as their vaunted vouchers program for digital purchases, or their gold coins cash back program, also for digital games. They stopped the Nintendo Selects/Players Choice lineup of budget price reissues of games entirely in the Switch generation. There are, as of right now, almost no “official” avenues available to help mitigate the asking price of Nintendo games at all.
It’s essentially Nintendo trying to maximize its cut, because the company knows that it can get away with it. Across nearly two hundred years, Nintendo has never been as successful or well-positioned as it is now. The Switch will end its run as the highest selling system of all time, set new records for software sales, their IP and franchises are more popular and more relevant than ever before, thanks to an explosion of sales on the Switch, their characters are multimedia properties now thanks to Nintendo’s ventures into movies and theme parks… essentially, in large part, the on average 30 million people who bought Zelda or Pokemon, the 50 million who bought Animal Crossing, or the nearly 70 million who bought Mario Kart, aren’t going to sit out the hardware that plays the next entries in those games for long.
They might hold out until they can get a better deal/reconcile themselves with the expense better, but even with some spillage and shrinkage generation on generation, the Switch 2 is guaranteed to do well. You may not expect it to do as well as the Switch’s 150 million plus, but it will definitely be above 100 million by the end of its lifespan, and it will probably finish closer to the Game Boy and PS4’s 120 million.
Even the 3DS, which came at a time when Nintendo’s IPs and properties were a lot smaller than they are today, and which had a far more turbulent launch than the Switch 2 looks to have, managed to get to 75 million – and again, that was in the pre-Switch explosion era. Nintendo IPs in the Wii/Wii U days were nowhere near as big as they are today – a baseline of success is guaranteed, for good or for bad.
Much like PlayStation in the home console space, Nintendo in the portable space now realizes that it is dominant in the market with no viable or credible challenger (the enthusiast-favourite Steam Deck has only sold 4 million units as of the end of last year, as per a report by IDC Estimates; the Switch is at 150 million), just like PlayStation realized there is no credible alternative for customers to migrate to en masse. And just like PlayStation, Nintendo has decided to up the ante with its pricing and charging, to the consumers’ detriment.
What the situation looks like a few years down the line remains to be seen. At the very least, on a hardware front. Nintendo will have a cheaper model available on the market sooner rather than later. The much more problematic software front is where things are more questionable. It is possible Nintendo introduces some initiatives to address pricing concerns by then – both the voucher system and the gold coins system on the Switch came more than a year after the system had been out.
Or hey, maybe Nintendo decides to be normal and has more frequent and/or better sales for its games instead. It remains to be seen. As of right now, for as slick as the Switch 2 hardware looks, and for as exciting as Donkey Kong and Mario Kart both look, it is impossible to deny that the Switch 2 is decidedly not priced in a way that would make it compelling to Nintendo’s family audiences.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
