TL;DR: Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser discussed with Wired the impact of new tariffs on the Nintendo Switch 2, which may increase its price from $449 to $600. The tariffs affect manufacturing in Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Nintendo is assessing the situation, having already moved some production out of China.
I wasn’t even going to pay $449, let alone $600. I figured it would have been somewhere between $300-400, with 400 being on the high end of reasonable.
$449 I would have waited a bit. But $600??? I get it’s because of tarrifs, but that’s really going to hurt the systems long term sales numbers the same way covid hurt PS5’s lifetime sales numbers.
New PS5’s and other consoles will also get way more expensive. So relatively the switch is still the same price at 600, compared to everything else.
Until MY pay goes up, that just means everything is more expensive, and I won’t be buying new things.
thing is ps6 and whatever god forsaken name they come up for the next xbox are still multiple years out, no?
Tariffs are not just for new products (new models). As soon as the current ps5 stock of a retailer is gone, they have to order new ones and pay a tariff. Then they make it more expensive for the consumer.
lets say Walmart now sells a ps5 for $400, but in a month they have to order new ones, from China. The order is more expensive than the one last month because of the tariffs, so they pay like 40% more. Walmart will now sell the ps5 for about $550 to you.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t jacked up the prices already! Partly because CapitalismTM — but also because I fully expect for big retailers like Walmart to have 30-90 day payment terms with vendors, and some of those invoices potentially being subject to these tariffs.
…stop being right! I got angry reading that, but when I clicked reply to yell at you, I realized it was all emotional backlash on my end. I couldn’t formulate a thought process to show why you’re wrong. Because you’re not wrong. I just hate that you’re right!
Tip: The price comes down If Trump gets impeached.
Oh good. That means it should already be 2X lower then, right?
Yeah I’m not in it at either price point. I’ll for once be a patient gamer and wait until it’s reasonable or I’ll skip this one. I’m betting there’s lots like us.
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There is the used games market, if you are willing to engage with it, though that does need you to be really patient.
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The games don’t drop in price, but the consoles do. There’s even a chance the price could go down for the holiday season, even if it’s something miniscule. This launch price is the early adopter tax.
You can hope there will be a sudden price drop in about 5 years…
hehe prices only drop temporarily for sales
I’m sorry, did I read that right? The president’s name is BOWSER??
Yeah and Nintendo also ruined the life of a person named Gary Bowser too.
So long Gary Bowser
Nintendo surely wouldn’t do something anti consumer would they?
Nintendo is a shitty company and companies in general do shitty anti consumer things, but passing along tariff costs isn’t one of these.
Right. The only difference between a tariff and a VAT, is that the VAT applies to all products indiscriminately, where as a tariff only applies to imported goods.
That one is on America.
So something that I wonder about with the MSRP is how much of that is a Nvidia tax that inflated the price? The Nvidia GPU market has been so absolutely screwed by Nvidia’s lack of competition pricing model.
nVidia genuinely does not care about gaming. It is just a way to have a few extra bins to increase effective yields for their datacenter/AI chips. If Nintendo wants to buy in bulk they’ll sell in bulk. And if Nintendo doesn’t like nVidia’s prices they can talk to AMD… like the other consoles did. Jensen will just sell those chips as mobile devices or cars or whatever.
Most speculation was around 400 USD for the switch itself for the given specs, tooling, etc. The Steam Deck is a different process but their LCD model is pretty indicative. 450 was a bump that would account for economic uncertainty and give them room to drop back down for regular discounts and the like.
Then trump trumped the bed and the previously expected buffer zone just isn’t enough. Which is why we are seeing the massive price hike.
Backwards compatibility means they might not be able to talk to AMD unfortunately, depending on how the software is set up I’d assume.
I and many people with a Cool PS2 can attest that AMD hardware has no problems running Switch games.
Never heard of that, I assume it’s an emulator. Emulation is different from running a game natively. Yeah, Nintendo probably could get AMD hardware to work as a replacement for Nvidia hardware, but I would guess either compatibility would be imperfect, there would be a performance hit, or both.
Switch 2 emulates Switch 1 games, so being Nvidia or AMD doesn’t really matter there
Business to business is different than the consumer market. Nintendo comes to Nvidia and orders a custom product with a minimum order of 10 million chips, Nvidia wants that deal. They aren’t going to arbitrarily increase the price because they can because Nintendo can and will move to another vendor. Nvidia wouldn’t risk fucking up a long-standing relationship like that, especially since Nintendo is a repeat customer, and they can rely on repeat business from them each year. These are long standing relationships that don’t just fall apart that quickly unless one party wants to drastically change what they are doing.
