Last week, Nintendo made the unprecedented move of delaying US Switch 2 preorders to "assess" the impact of Donald Trump's massive tariffs on the countries where the console is produced. Before most of those tariffs were recently delayed for 90 days, many were wondering if the company may be mulling a last-minute increase in the Switch 2's $450 asking price to account for those import taxes.
While industry analysts think that kind of immediate price increase is unlikely, they warn that Trump's tariffs could have longer-term impacts on Switch 2 pricing and supplies in the US for years to come.
DFC Intelligence CEO David Cole, for instance, said in a recent analyst note that the company is currently modeling "a 20 percent price increase over the next two years" across all video game hardware thanks to "broader macroeconomic challenges." In the case of the Switch 2, though, Cole clarified that "we believe much of the 20 percent increase was already baked into the $450 price," which Nintendo is "not likely" to raise at this point.
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Nintendo's barrage of Switch announcements over the last two weeks have also come with changes to the way Nintendo treats physical and digital copies of games.
Digital games can now become "virtual game cards," facilitating slightly more flexible sharing of digitally purchased games between multiple Switch systems owned by the same person or family of people. And physical copies of games can now be either traditional game cards—little bits of plastic with the game stored on a flash memory chip inside—or "Game-Key cards," which look the same from the outside but don't actually have any game data stored on them.
A Game-Key card has a "key" stored on it that prompts a download of the game data from Nintendo's servers the first time you insert it. From then on, the game behaves like a cross between a digital download and a physical game—all of the game's content has to be on the console's internal storage or a microSD Express card, but you need to have the Game-Key card inserted before the game will launch.
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In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we're looking at.
But interviews with Nintendo executives and a blog post from Nvidia did at least confirm several of the new chip's capabilities. The "custom Nvidia processor" has a GPU "with dedicated [Ray-Tracing] Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements," writes Nvidia Software Engineering VP Muni Anda.
This means that, as rumored, the Switch 2 will support Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology, which helps to upscale a lower-resolution image into a higher-resolution image with less of a performance impact than native rendering and less loss of quality than traditional upscaling methods. For the Switch games that can render at 4K or at 120 FPS 1080p, DLSS will likely be responsible for making it possible.
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Last week, the Financial Times reported that Nintendo shifted half of its production capabilities for the upcoming Switch 2 to Cambodia and Vietnam, in part to avoid Donald Trump’s trade war on China. Wednesday morning, Nintendo formally announced the Switch 2, and its $449 price, which is $150 more than the Switch. A few hours later, Trump announced tariffs on the entire world, with particularly large fees on China, Vietnam, and Cambodia.
There are going to be far more important and damaging impacts of Trump’s unilateral trade war on everyone than the price of an already expensive game console likely going up. The U.S. stock market has already plunged. But the timing and narrative around the Switch 2—the successor to one of the most popular games consoles of all time—highlights how destabilizing this is likely to be, the interconnectedness of the global economy, and the fact that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and onshore manufacturing to the United States without massive pain. Gamers, understandably, are pissed, and award-winning economists say they are right to be. I thought it'd be useful to discuss the broader impact of the tariffs with leading economics by focusing on the Switch 2, because it's such a high-profile item.
“The policy announcement is astonishing for its stupidity,” Gene Grossman, a global trade expert and Princeton professor who won the Onassis Prize in International Trade, told 404 Media. “It seems like a joke!” He added that it is hard to know exactly what will happen given the overall “sea of idiocy” brought on by the tariffs.
Since Trump’s announcement, it has become clear that the administration calculated the tariffs for each country based on a crude formula that takes each country’s trade deficit with the United States, divides it by two, and sticks a percent sign at the end. This means new tariffs on Vietnamese-made goods will be 46 percent and new tariffs on Cambodian-made goods will be 49 percent.
“If [the Switch 2] is something that consumers are dying to have ‘at any price,’ then the price will go up. If consumers can readily switch to something else, then if Nintendo wants to sell these things, it will have to lower the price,” Grossman said. “Yes, I think it is quite possible that the price will go even higher than $449.99. Some expectations of a tariff may have been built into this price, as you suggest, but I don’t think anyone expected a 46% tariff on Vietnam, not even close.”
Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax law and policy at UCLA School of Law, told 404 Media that “the tariffs announced will definitely increase prices further over what is baked into price levels currently,” and that Nintendo will “have other markets they can sell to tariff-free, so they have no reason to sell at a special low price in the United States, certainly not enough to offset the full tariff.”
Felix Tintelnot, an associate professor of economics at Duke University, told 404 Media it can be costly for companies to change their publicly announced prices.
"I think two things are true at the same time: 1. It is likely that Nintendo did not expect the tariff on Vietnam to be 46%," Tintelnot told 404 Media. "2. It is costly for firms to change prices, particularly after publicly announcing one. So I would think it is somewhat uncertain what they will do. One possibility would be for the price to remain unchanged, but the price of complementary goods to increase, such as games."
Jason Cherubini, an executive in residence of finance at Loyola University Maryland, said it’s possible Nintendo had already priced in some unknown level of tariffs prior to the announcement, and that he thinks the price for the Switch 2 is unlikely to change because video game companies have historically sold consoles at a loss and then made money back on the sale of games.
“Nintendo started to diversify their manufacturing away from China with the impending threat of tariffs but also to move away from geopolitical concentration in China. But these tariffs were not wholly unexpected,” he said. “I think the price they announced is the price that’s going to stick, because with consoles a lot of pricing is strategic pricing as opposed to being based on the true cost of manufacturing it … especially Nintendo, who really keeps all of their IP, their games, so much of that is in-house, it’s probably even more important for Nintendo to get people to have the console, so that way they're buying Zelda, they're buying Mario, they're buying all of these IP that Nintendo then profits off of. Getting people to purchase it is more important than them making money on the console itself.”
We don’t know what is actually going to happen with the Switch 2 yet, but prices are almost definitely going to go up for almost everything across the entire economy, Grossman said.
“While I can’t say confidently about this item, I can say that prices will go up for a whole range of goods, starting with cars and right on down to clothing,” he said.
Trump has announced these tariffs with the nominal goal of moving manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring manufacturing—especially of high tech goods—has been a goal of various administrations over the years, and was a goal of Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which the Trump administration has sought to gut.
There are numerous practical problems with trying to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. They include the fact that lots of factory work is so underpaid and grueling that people in China don’t even want to do it anymore; the average age of factory workers in China is rising and companies there have begun shifting jobs to more developing nations like Vietnam and Cambodia.
Many of the raw materials and components needed for tech manufacturing are not mined or made in the United States, meaning those components and rare earth metals are going to be subject to tariffs. American companies do not have the expertise or ability to build lots of products in the United States, and setting up factories and supply chains to do so is not going to be an overnight process, it will be one that takes years or decades depending on the product.
“Nintendo would need to spend billions to open a factory in the US,” Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners and a video game market analyst, tweeted. “It'd probably take 4-5 years to complete this. Not to mention the time and cost to rebuild supply chain infrastructure and source components (which would be subject to tariffs because they're made outside the US). Nintendo would have to pay each worker about 10x to 15x more than they would for a worker in Vietnam. Then after you add up the initial capital expenditure, labor cost, supply chain cost, operational costs etc... you'd be able to buy a US manufactured Nintendo Switch 2 in 5 years for a significantly higher price than $450. And the kicker is that by the time they've done all that, the US will have a new president who most likely removes all the reciprocal tariffs anyway.”
Cherubini said that reshoring electronics manufacturing is “not something you can just flip a switch on. Optimistically you’re looking at a year for simpler manufacturing, but a lot of it is a multi-year process.”
I have covered attempts by the electronics industry to create high tech factories and mining operations in the United States; many of them are not going particularly well. The United States has only one rare earth minerals mine (in California), which has been mining for less than 10 years. Foxconn and TSMC factories in the United States have had a mixed record and do not have anywhere near the sophistication or capacity as their factories in Taiwan and China.
This is all to say that, based on where things stand this morning, we are in for a world of economic pain.
Among the changes mentioned in yesterday's Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn't just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device's 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you're using in your current Switch, including Sandisk's Nintendo-branded ones, can't migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games.
Why is regular-old MicroSD no longer good enough? It all comes down to speed.
Most run-of-the-mill SD and microSD cards you can buy today are using some version of the Ultra High Speed (UHS) standard. Designed to augment the default speed (12.5MB/s) and high speed (25MB/s) from the earliest versions of the SD card standard, the three UHS versions enable data transfers of up to 624MB/s.
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The Nintendo Switch 2 could be considered the most direct "sequel" to a Nintendo console that the company has ever made. The lineage is right there in the name, with Nintendo simply appending the number "2" onto the name of its incredibly successful previous console for the first time in its history.
Nintendo's previous consoles have all differed from their predecessors in novel ways that were reflected in somewhat new naming conventions. The Switch 2's name, on the other hand, suggests that it is content to primarily be "more Switch." And after spending the better part of the day playing around with the Switch 2 hardware and checking out some short game demos on Wednesday, I indeed came away with the impression that this console is "more Switch" in pretty much every way that matters, for better or worse.
We've deduced from previous trailers just how much bigger the Switch 2 would be than the original Switch. Even with that preparation, though, the expanded Switch 2 makes a very good first impression in person.
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Nintendo's Switch 2 presentation gave us pricing for the console ($449 to start) and Nintendo's product pages have given us pricing information for accessories ($80 for a Pro Controller, $90 for another pair of Joy-Cons, and $110 for a replacement dock, sheesh). But what Nintendo didn't mention during the presentation was game pricing, either for standalone Switch 2 titles or the Switch 2 Edition upgrades for existing Switch games.
Nintendo announced via its website after the presentation that Mario Kart World, the console's flagship launch title, will cost $50 when you buy a digital copy as part of a Switch 2 bundle. But the game will cost $80 when you buy it on its own, $30 more than the pack-in version and $20 more than the usual $60 price for first-party Switch games.
Pre-order listings at US retailers that have gone live since this morning also list several $80 games—we'll use Wal-Mart's as an example. The upgraded Switch 2 Editions for a trio of Switch games—2024's Super Mario Party Jamboree, 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and 2022's Kirby and the Forgotten Land—are all going for $80, the same as Mario Kart World.
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I don't think anybody outside Nintendo or FromSoftware was expecting a spiritual successor to Bloodborne to be one of the titles announced at the Nintendo Switch 2's launch today. Not just "playable" on the Switch 2, but exclusive to it. But there it was, The Duskbloods, debuting its dread horror action just a few minutes before the luminously pink and puffy Kirby Air Ride 2.
The Switch 2's launch titles, and other announced games, are quite the rich stew. Here are some of the AAA ports, exclusives, and unexpectedly gruesome games arriving on the just-announced system.
Riding it like he stole it (in 2003).
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Nintendo
We'll get to FromSoftware's surprising Switch 2 exclusive in a bit. Far less surprising is a new Mario Kart game, as Mario Kart 8 sold more than 67 million copies, covering more than 40 percent of all Switches sold. Mario Kart World goes big, with 24 simultaneous players, and the ability to explore off the course in a kind of open-world setting.
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We've known for a few months now that the Nintendo Switch 2 will support backward compatibility for older Nintendo Switch games, and as of today's presentation, we also know that some Switch games will get special Switch 2 Editions that add new features and support higher resolutions and other features.
Nintendo's product pages for the Switch add more details, including the status of backward-compatibility testing for original Switch games and a small handful of first-party Switch games that will get "free updates" to enhance them for Switch 2.
First, some good news. There will be a second tier of updates for original Switch games that Nintendo says "may improve performance or add support for features such as GameShare in select games." These won't include the extra features or higher resolutions of Switch 2 Edition games, but they'll be available for free, and they ought to improve playability. Nintendo lists a dozen first-party Switch games that will benefit from free Switch 2 updates:
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