TheHans255.com
My Two Cents on the Nintendo Switch 2's Pricing

My Two Cents on the Nintendo Switch 2's Pricing

My extended thoughts on the changes in video game pricing surrounding the Nintendo Switch 2 releasing in June 2025, including whether I think it is warranted, the larger economic state surrounding the discussion, and more.

By: TheHans255

5/2/2025

I recently had the chance to go to the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience, an in-person event where I got a chance to play with the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware before its release on June 5, 2025. I had a great time and was really impressed by what was on offer, and it's very likely I'm going to buy it when I get the chance.

However, before I talk about this - or, really, talk about any Nintendo game past or future, given the circumstances - I should acknowledge the fact that Nintendo is charging a heccin' lot for this thing. And not just charging more for the hardware, but also increasing the standard AAA price of games from the previous historical 60 USD to the much higher 80 USD, a price point heretofore reserved for "ultimate" editions of games that include extra premium content. And I should also acknowledge, as I have in the past, that Nintendo's consumer practices are not as friendly as I would like. Therefore, I think it would behoove me to talk in detail about what I think about all this, as I have similarly in the past with Unity's pricing scheme.

First of all, what are the facts we know?

And now, to talk about what I think.

First of all, I should quickly talk about the console itself, and lay out why I don't think it is the main focus of discussion. While it is more expensive than its predecessor, even when adjusted for inflation, its price is actually decently in line with the other consoles that the Switch 2 is competing with, specifically the Xbox Series and Playstation 5 consoles. And as someone who has experienced the hardware in person, I would have to say that the Switch 2 is worth its 450 USD asking price, simply because it is a well-made, quality piece of kit that outclasses the similar 400 USD Steam Deck in nearly every way:

Of course, the Steam Deck has one major point in its favor over Nintendo: the ability to sideload other games. Because the Steam Deck is quite transparently a Linux computer, it is very easy to load your own games on the system and play them with full integration with Steam's tools, provided that the games are compatible with Linux or Proton. For games that are actually bought from the Steam store, Steam has one of the most delightful digital game shopping experiences on the market, with the ability to not only easily buy games and share them amongst as many of your own PCs as you please (I own no less than 3 such machines), but also the ability to refund any game you could not get working or simply don't like, provided that you played it for less than 2 hours and owned it for less than 2 weeks.

By contrast, Nintendo's ecosystem makes a lot of this impossible. From the beginning, Nintendo has either employed physical security measures or legal protections to prevent you from running unlicensed games on their hardware, and have only gotten better and better at doing this as time has gone on - indeed, it is only really possible on Switch 1 due to an unpatchable hardware bug in the Tegra X1 chip that was fixed on models released after 2018. The Switch 2 is almost certainly no different - if you want to play games on Switch 2, the games need to be purchased from Nintendo, either digitally or through physical media (which, through the existence of Game Key cards, is becoming an increasingly meaningless distinction). What's more, the Switch 2 marketplace does not allow refunds except in places where they are required by law to provide them. I believe that that is indeed a major sticking point when talking about game prices.

What's more, this segues nicely into the other major crux of the issue, which is that the standard price of full AAA games has risen to 80 USD. And that's because this decision affects not only Nintendo fans, but anyone else who buys games, simply because of the fact that other companies will look to Nintendo and see their price increases as an excuse to do it themselves. In a way, the decades-long 60 USD game prices has been seen as a sort of bastion against runaway inflation, and with that gone, we can expect game prices to only get even higher as time goes on. (And the political climate of impending tariffs and trade wars does not help matters at all.)

(Also, the Steam Deck's SSD is removable and replacable if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty, while the Switch's UFS is soldered to the motherboard, so there's that.)

As I've said before in my post about Unity's pricing, I ultimately think that our business model in software, that of selling copies, is unnatural. It is wholly divorced from the work that is actually put into building that software, where the revenue comes from how well the marketing team works and how effectively the ecosystem can prevent someone who has not bought a copy of the software from using it, rather than from how much effort the developers actually put into their product.

I believe that the ideal system for selling games or anything else would be something that would actually obviate the need for copyright protections or DRM at all, where instead of attempting to sell individual copies of a game, we crowdfund the game as a single, wholesale unit sold to the general population. I will once again link game developer Jason Rohrer's extensive essay on the subject in which he proposes a scheme for how this might work.

That said, I am willing to deal with the selling copies method for now, because I feel it is at least more respectful of the user's autonomy than other exisitng solutions for marketing games. Specifically, in models where I am expected to purchase a license for the full game, and with that get the rights to everything in that game, the software ecosystem only has to check this at game launch and otherwise can give me free rein to all of the bits of the game that it can show me - it does not have to prevent me from using the software in any particular way it does not like, such as by using a glitch to get access to an item I have not unlocked yet. By contrast, if you try to fund a game either by making it free or a cheap base price, then use microtransactions or DLC to raise the game to its full price of 80 USD or more, then the system suddenly has an obligation to lock out data from the game that you do not have the license to use - glitching access to an item can now be punishable under the terms of service if the expected way to unlock that item is to pay the developer money.

And as for the increased price, I think that devs deserve to get paid a liveable wage, simple as that. The video game industry is one of the worst places to work right now and has only gotten worse in the last few years, and I would have to hazard that game prices staying the same while the scope of games released has gotten higher and higher has something to do with that. Games give us so much joy, and the people who work on them deserve to be given the resources to do so sustainably, as well as simply lead their own lives.

However, this leads me into my next point: how much can people actually afford these increased prices of games? At least here in the US, where I live, I'm not sure how much people actually can.

Now, I do have to say that I think you have to be in a very specific financial situation in order to be able to genuniely afford a gaming habit when AAA games are 60 USD, but be entirely shut out of it when AAA games are 80 USD. The only situations I can think of are where a person only really plays one AAA series (such as Call of Duty or FIFA) and uses a limited budget to buy each year's installment - realized practically either by a parent buying the game for their child for Christmas or their birthday, or the child themselves expected to purchase the game from their own limited allowance. (Only one of those two groups is likely going to be chanting "DROP THE PRICE" on a Nintendo Treehouse stream, and frankly, it's unlikely that that group has much of a nuanced view on anything.)

It is, however, much easier to end up in a situation where an increase in AAA games to 80 USD will severely restrict the amount of games you are able to purchase, to the point where the games you can still buy won't be enough. And this is simply because, once again, the increase in price for AAA games will affect every other game as well - indie games that used to cost 15 USD might cost 20 USD, a cheaper AA game that used to go for 40 USD might go for 50 or even 60 USD now. Some people do have the disposable income to reconfigure their budgets and spend more on games to keep up their habits, but frankly, at least here in the US, a lot of people don't - the price of goods has been steadily rising for a while, sharply rising in the few years after COVID started and threatening to sharply rise again with the introduction of higher tariffs, but our wages have remained stagnant for decades. Lots of our citizens can't even afford all the food they need and are struggling to pay rent, with only the tiniest of precious bonuses spent on fun and games, and if those games are now more expensive, people simply aren't going to buy them.

The phrase "bread and circuses" comes to mind - the idea that if a politician can't genuinely help its people, it might be able to placate them with basic food and entertainment to distract them from the bigger problems. That bread has been increasingly harder to come by, and with these price increases, the circuses are going out of reach as well.

Of course, there are still plenty of people, myself included, who can afford and enjoy these things. Even then, though, there is still a question: with the increased prices, is what's on offer even still worth it?

With my experience with the Nintendo Switch library, I do feel that for at least a few games, it will be, but there are also a great many games that will not. With just the first-party games in consideration, many of these sold for 50 and 60 USD, and often came with DLC that put the total price at 80 or even 90 USD:

What makes things more difficult on the Nintendo Switch is that since the eShop does not offer refunds, every time you buy a game on Switch, you are essentially playing a lottery on whether the purchase will be worth it - and the asking price of those lottery tickets has just gone up. That means that while I can afford 80 USD games, I will have to do a lot more research on each game to see what it's actually about and whether it would be a good fit for me.

And if a game is sold on a platform that doesn't need me to play a lottery, and there's no particular reason I need it on the Switch 2, then I simply won't play the Switch 2's lottery. Effectively, that means that I will either be using the Switch 2 to play Nintendo's first party games, or using it to play games that will not run on Linux due to anti-cheat restrictions.

It's hard to come up with a great conclusion to this sort of thing, but I can at least try by suggesting what I think should be done about it.

As I said above, I think that at the end of the day, devs should get paid, and their work should be worth it without having to squeeze every last penny out of customers with DLC and microtransactions. Because our stagnating economy is simply giving our lay citizens less money to spend, I think that the better thing for game studios to do, in order to ensure that they are making money back on their investment, is to reduce the scope of their games, such that a 60 USD asking price can still make a profit and pay the employees. Instead of doing more and more things and going for more and more realistic graphics, focus on doing a smaller number of things well and being very clear and effective in how you present them.

And fortunately, there are a great many studios around the world doing exactly that. Not just with niche indie titles that appeal to the long tail, such as the endlessly replayable Balatro, but also AA games that go for things like mass appeal and higher graphics fidelity while still limiting their scope to levels deliverable at cheaper prices, such as the adventure platformer Stray or the romping multiplayer shooter Helldivers 2. The best games are getting more expensive, but the less expensive games are getting better, and the people who know how to cater to these ever increasing budget markets are going to do incredibly well.

And while it is quite possible that I will have a Switch 2 in hand by June 5th, on that day, it will go untouched in favor of one of these games. DELTARUNE, one of my favorite games of all time, is going to be getting its 3rd and 4th chapters on the same day, and you'd better believe that I'm going to be spending all of my free time playing them. (Fun fact: this game is where the green pointy hat on my logo comes from!)

(And hey, if you have a PC, you can play it too! You don't even need a fancy graphics card. People have even gotten it to work on Android too, if that's how you're reading this site).

Copyright © 2022-2025, TheHans255. This work is licensed under the CA BY 4.0 license - permission is granted to share and adapt this content for personal and commercial use as long as credit is given to the creator.