Nintendo Delays Switch 2 Pre-orders in the US Due to Trump Tariffs, Still Launches June 5 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 April 2025 / 5,667 Views
Nintendo in a statement has delayed the pre-order start date for the Nintendo Switch 2 in the US due to potential impact of the Trump tariffs.
The launch date for the Nintendo Switch 2 remains unchanged in the US and will still release on June 5.
"Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," reads the statement from Nintendo (via Polygon).
"Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged."
Nintendo on Wednesday announced the Nintendo Switch 2 will launch for $449.99 USD, while a Mario Kart World Bundle will also be available for $499.99 USD. Later the same day Trump announced tariffs for the majority of countries. This includes tariffs on countries in which the Nintendo Switch 2 is produced.
A report from Financial Times last month suggested Nintendo has shifted production away from China and that over half of the hardware imported into the US from Nintendo comes from Vietnam and Cambodia, which will see a 46 percent and 49 percent tariff, respectively.
It is possible due to the tariffs Nintendo could increase the price of Switch 2 in the US.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.
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Drop the price!
Wait...
KEEP THE PRICE!
Reverse psychology?
"drop the price" (50$ on the console, and 10$ on the games). Then Reality sets in... and its actually going to go up.
Price increase incoming already or they want to make sure a majority of preorders go to countries other than the US.
Rumors were they had plenty of US units stockpiled for that exact scenario, but something is clearly making them review their plans.
When I pointed out that Trump had a grudge against Japan in another article, people downvoted it to hell and back.
Why don't they just drop Trump on Japan instead? That way, unlike with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nothing of importance will be lost.
They were using Vietnam to manufacture as no one thought they would get tariffs...
But they were also hit lol
An island full of penguins got hit with them (not even joking) I'm guessing Mars is next.
Nintendo announced during the first Trump administration that they were moving production to Vietnam to avoid tariffs on China. It's just their bad luck they they moved to a location that is now going to be taxed even harder. I find it hard to believe that Trump didn't plan this.
Trump's last clusterfuck (his eye-poppingly horrible mismanagement of COVID) actually boosted Nintendo. His current (and completely unforced) clusterfuck is going to damage the industry.
The whole world was a clusterfk during early covid bud lol
Trump still had a big part of making the world shitty as it was, and is becoming again. We've got kids dying of the measles because of Trump bringing RFK Jr on board.
I'm in Texas. The only child that died from the measles lived 30 miles away from me. The child lived in a small Mennonite community in Seminole and was of school age. The parents chose not to have the child vaccinated for measles long before the recent presidency. And the choice they made had nothing to do with politics. Albeit, a vaccination would likely have prevented the child's death.
VERY likely. I'm thankful for my immunizations.
My mother suffered permanent vision damage from measles. My sister in law has lifelong effects from being exposed to rubella in utero. I’m glad my mom got me vaccinated.
Well, yeah, if you forget the massive anti vaccines campaign by the right during the COVID years, you can almost say it had "nothing to do with politics".
Not to mention a bunch of redneck losers plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
idk i honestly think the stimulus checks were prolly a huge contributing factor toward why tech products (which includes NSW) exploded in value during 2020/2021.
I feel being stuck at home especially with kids was a larger driver for the switches record breaking sales during that period.
Animal Crossing was the perfect game for the social climate in released it.
As opposed to The Last of Us Part II.
Well, I guess the Switch 2 is in trouble now.
the whole industry is
Unfortunately, that's true. Hopefully, this crap will end quickly, but I'm not sure when.
I give it max 6 months..... Trump will walk back his Tarrifs, too many people will be angry and his popularity in polls will drop, and eventually he will back off.
Maybe it'll be done sooner. Apparently, Trump and Vietnam are already in talks to negotiate. https://www.forexlive.com/news/trump-indicates-he-is-in-deal-mode-after-call-with-vietnam-20250404/
I've been hoping since 2015 for something else to end. Here's a hint, it's orange, dried out, and has been a brain tumor on the White House.
Facts. Reason why I'm focusing on Indie Devs at this point lol
Not for us retro gamers.
499 and 549 price incomming
Perhaps it will go up in price by $50.
Could easily be 100$, if they planned for like a 20% tariff but Trump went to like 40%+.
All because American voters are mostly complete idiots. -_-
Half of them at least.
A little less than half of the votes went to him and close to 90 million people didn’t vote. So I’ll say it’s over half.
The right is far more clueless than the left.
Um, no. Both extreme ends are just as crazy as each other. On the right, you have the idiots who charged the capital thinking it was going to make a difference. On the left, you have the idiots who think destroying cars/car dealerships are going to make a difference. Both are equally insane, and both are what's wrong with everything... equally.
Instead of increasing prices 10-20% across the board, Nintendo could have just dumped the 50% burden on the US and let the rest of us have a cheap system :)
The US deserves it's current economic instability.
The U.S. is Nintendo's largest market, by far.
It doesn't have to be. Give Europe a cheap Switch 2, and maybe we start buying them in droves instead.
And do the same to Canada while they're at it. At least before Poilievre sells is out to Moronica.
That's not the point. The US is the one who put up these trade taxes, not the rest of the world. They should pay their own bills. It shouldn't be offset onto the rest of the world when we don't live or vote there. Nintendo shouldn't be forcing us to pay because the US government has the financial instincts of an infant.
The tariffs being imposed on the world aren't even the same amount that they have been imposing on the US for decades. I believe the US is just tired of all the current tariffs that have been on them and want trade to go to some type of fair levels. When the world lifts their tariffs on the US, the US will lift their tariffs. The trade war will likely be a short term pain, long term gain situation and shouldn't be a long fought battle.
I believe Vietnam is already beginning to have discussions with the US about eliminating the tariffs they've had on the US and in turn the US will eliminate theirs.
Vietnam can’t reduce tariffs that aren’t real.
“ The suggestion by the US Administration that Vietnam had imposed tariffs equivalent to an average of 90% across US products being imported into Vietnam has left Vietnam officials and pundits bemused. However, the actual trade weighted average tariff rate for Vietnam is approximately 5.1%.”
The real problem is that Trump thinks all trade should be tit for tat; that countries should be coerced into buying American goods, regardless of the quality, or of the people of those countries want or need American goods. The U.S. is not only a heavily consumption-driven economy with a huge appetite for goods and resources, it's also the third most populous country in the world. A lot of countries can supply the U.S.'s voracious appetite for raw materials and finished goods, but they simply don't have enough population or money to match what they're selling with purchases. And since they're selling, but not buying, because they don't need hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American stuff, Trump and his voters equate that with "subsidizing" a country. He's repeatedly tried to hold ceasefire agreements behind control of Ukraine's resources. He's trying to coerce European countries into buying American weapons, which are really the only manufactured products where the U.S. has an edge. Even then,, Europe has weapons manufactuerers like Glock and Sig Sauer, and France is the second biggest weapons exporter. I myself own a Glock 48 9mm made in Austria.
Trump lied about that. Canada, for example, has almost no actual tariff on the US. The dairy tariffs Trump whines about only kick in if the U.S. exceeds a quota of milk it sells in Canada, and the U.S. dairy industry has never reached the quota to where those tariffs would kick in, by their own admission.That is to protect the Canadian market from being flooded with American milk that drives Canadian milk prices down to the point where Canadian dairy farmers cannot operate, which results in them dumping milk that they cannot sell and possibly slaughtering their cows and shutting down their farms. These are agreements that Trump himself made on his own trade deal in his first term.
The fact is, Trump and his voters have a huge chip on their shoulder towards the entire world,. It's a "poor poor pitiful me" chip on their shoulder, and it's going to carry a hefty price tag. It's going to be a lot more than short-term pain. Grievance politics are a hell of a drug, and one whose addicts cannot afford it. Manufacturing is never going to be as big in the U.S. again as it was in the 1950s, and a lot of that is because the world is different. Europe, China, and Japan are no longer smouldering from World War II. India is no longer a British subject. Africa is also making its presence known on the world stage. Automation is hollowing out manufacturing even in Asia. Sour heavy oil from Canada allows the U.S. to export its own light sweet crude at huge premiums.
First, you literally just made that up. And either way, irrelevant; what you said has no impact on what the rest of us should be paying. Only what the US should be paying, their taxes, their bill. Nintendo is unfairly charging the rest of us extra to offset the incompetence of another country's trade taxes.
The EU supposedly has like 2% tariff rate against the USA. Meanwhile Trump claims its like 40%, hence why he put 20% in place on EU. Its not real. He isn't talking about fairness or tariffs, he wants EU to buy as much as US buys from the EU. Instead of making better products, that sell better, he wants to force people to buy unnecessary American crap instead.... because Trade balance. Meanwhile he ignores that EU buys alot of services from the US, and the trade balance is actually much smaller than he says. Basically he lies. It feels like hes trying to extort money.
The tariffs on the US are not real. The Trump administration posted their formula for determining the tariffs that countries charge the US and it’s complete nonsense. It’s the Trade deficit divided by the total trade with that country or something. So if a country has a trade deficit with the US of 1b and total trade is 2b they did some calculation like 1b divided by 2b =0.5 I.e their tariffs are 50%, so our reciprocal tariff will be 25%.
For example the average tariff among all goods imported by the UK from the US is only 3.3%. The UK doesn’t even have a trade deficit with the US and it still gets a blanket 10% tariff on all goods. They’re not even pretending reciprocity there.
The whole thing is a lie. They want to get rid of things like Income taxes and replace them with revenue from tariffs because guess what, rich people pay a lot of income tax but tariffs raising prices of basic goods is irrelevant to them. The fact people can’t see the obvious is completely insane to me.
Tariffs are like a tax that hurt the poor in society the most. Meanwhile the money generated off of the US consumers, can be used to give tax breaks for the wealthy. I wouldn't be surprised.
We need another Occupy Wall Street movement.
One of the major figures in the last OWS movement is now a MAGA podcaster.
Fuck!!
Yeah, Tim Pool. He saw that being a MAGA grifter was more profitable and acted accordingly. Turns out he was also getting money from Russia, though he claims he was duped into taking Russian money.
I hope this is the move. Let America experience the consequences of their own actions. If they want 50% tariffs let them keep it, and pay for it themselves. Let rest of the world, have it priced normally. Don't try to off set the costs to other parts of the world, to pay for the US consumers prices.
I hope a Trump voter who really wanted to pre-order a Switch 2 feels bad right now.
This is going to REALLY hurt Nintendo. People were already screaming about the prices, and now the prices are gonna go up even more. Switch 2 will probably be $500 now in the US, and who knows maybe physical games will be $80(DK)-$90(MK) now instead of $70(DK)-$80(MK).
You know at Nintendo HQs they are seriously discussing right now how badly jacking up the prices even more is gonna hurt their business in the US since they already just announced (or rather didn't announce and let people find it online lol) two days ago that they are pushing prices to the extreme which had already lit their fans and the internet on fire with anger and disbelief.
If these price increases are going through, then the Switch 2 could cost $500 - $550. The PS5 and Xbox Series will also see a $100 - $150 increase.
Tariffs will make America rich. - Trump.
Really though it's only gonna make rich tumors like him richer.
It's a regressive tax, so American consumers will pay for it... While the rest of the world reduces trade with the USA and trades elsewhere.
The hegemony that is the USA is likely going to decline going forth, Europe is a larger trading market... And there are tons more trading opportunities in huge high-growth markets like China (4.8% GDP growth YoY) and India (6.5% GDP growth YoY) and Asia+Oceania (4.4% GDP growth YoY) - And that is around 5 billion potential customers verses the USA's 340 million.
I did mention that a price increase could occur on restocks down the line, it looks like Nintendo will not have to wait that long to adjust pricing.
Geo politics is gonna doom the switch 2 for this gen.
This is what happens when you vote for extreme men and women on either side.
If the tariffs were applied literally to the cost of Switch 2 (assuming none of the $450 took tariffs in mind), it would be around $650.
If it were that price, it would likely be DOA in the USA until a price cut could happen.
$700 was a hard sell for PS5 Pro, but that's a different market and a home console with higher overall specs.
Make them in Russia since Trump didn't slap his dom with any tariffs.
would probably be alot cheaper.... but would take investing into Russia, building factory and supply lines ect. So it would take like 5years or something. Also I'm sure Putin wouldn't put spyware inside Switch 2's :P (you know whats even cheaper? and can work now instead of 5years from now? removeing the tariffs, instant fix)
Russia doesn't deserve Nintendo.
$500 price incoming. Trump did that.
I think this whole situation will get progressively worse until they realise they can't launch it June 5
Maybe not. Seems Trump is already in talks with Vietnam right now. https://www.forexlive.com/news/trump-indicates-he-is-in-deal-mode-after-call-with-vietnam-20250404/
Trump doesn’t have backbone. I highly doubt any tariffs will go through, and even if they do, they will not last very long.
He's spineless, heartless, AND brainless, the complete right wing package.
