Former Nintendo Sales Lead Says Switch 2 Price is 'Going to Have to Go Up' Eventually - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 April 2026 / 3,585 Views
A former Nintendo sales lead that referred to as Sean in an interview with the Kit & Krysta podcast claims Nintendo will eventually have to increase the price of the Nintendo Switch 2.
He says Nintendo will wait as long as possible, but he feels it is "inevitable" that an increase will eventually come.
"Unfortunately I think eventually the hardware price is going to have to go up," he said (via VideoGamesChronicle). "I think that there’s things that they can and seem to be doing to try and mitigate that, but I also look at this move on on software as, if I’m reading it correctly, a way to make a hardware price increase a little bit more palatable.
"We’ve seen inflation being a problem for a while now. Tariffs are a more recent nuisance, but they’re not going away anytime soon. The demand that AI is causing for chips is is causing memory prices to go up.
"And you know, within the past couple of weeks, we have issues with oil prices going through the roof. And when oil goes through the roof, that’s not just shipping costs that go up, there’s… you know, we can imagine, to get the the games from wherever they’re being manufactured, to the warehouse, to the retailers, to the shelf, that’s going to drive the price up.
"But there’s other things that like people may not realise. Helium is a by-product of of producing oil. Helium is a key and unreplaceable ingredient in making semiconductors, which means hardware prices go up. It’s an unreplaceable by-product of making silicon wafers, which means if you’re Nintendo and you’re producing cartridges, that’s going up as well.
"So there’s all of these world events that have been for a while putting pressure on pricing and margins, and they don’t seem to be going away. Tariffs are going to be here for a while, it seems inflation is really stubborn and I don’t think the issues that we’re seeing in the Middle East with oil pricing is going to help that. In fact, it’s likely going to make inflation worsen and and stick around for even longer.
"So even if they are able to make concessions in some areas, hardware prices are going to go up I think, eventually."
Sean added that Nintendo will try to offset the drop in hardware profit margins with other forms of income like merchandising and software sales. However, he feels there will come a point the drop will become too large and the price will have to go up.
"If the proposition is ‘you’re going to spend a little bit more on hardware, but if you buy your games digitally, you can save money there’, that’s one way to look at it," he said. "Nintendo also has a lot of ancillary products – amiibo, t-shirts, lunchboxes, Lego, that they can make money from other other areas, not just the hardware.
"So they may be able to put off raising hardware prices for a moment, but I I think it’s inevitable that they’re going to go up for the first time. And, you know, we we’ve been through various phases with Nintendo through various economic turns and things, but it does really feel like this time in particular, there’s just so many outside forces that is kind of forcing their hand in a way that they probably aren’t really used to in the past.
"And so this is kind of new for them too, to manage through it. So I do wonder how they will manage through it and how they’re going to take steps to try to avoid it if they can."
Sony last week announced it is increasing the price of the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation Portal worldwide on April 2 (today) due to "continued pressures in the global economic landscape."
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 follow the author on Bluesky.
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Maybe this is just armchair platitudes, but it seems the greed of the US administration and its ultra-wealthy allies are driving up costs to the extent where, one-after-another, entire industries are becoming unsustainable.
Gaming can't really stay in this cost-realm long term and flourish. You need an affordable entry point. The automobile industry seems to be on the same trajectory. I suppose they just want everyone to lose their jobs when a depression is ultimately forced.
Na. The masses will smarten up and will rebel and take action.......LOLOLOLOL, NOT!
Oh, there will be small bands of hackers/people who rebel. You can bet on that. I fully expect at some point that some group of hackers will literally nuke the internet and most of the important servers, and it'll be back to the 80's, at least for awhile. It's practically inevitable, imo.
Except there won't be a UBI because if the bulk of taxpayers are permanently unemployable, that leaves only the wealthy as taxpayers to foot the bill. You really think they're going to agree to pick up the tab for UBI in the form of higher taxes after spending decades pushing for more and more tax cuts? They'd rather leave us to all die in ditches somewhere while they go live in their own self-contained Galt's Gulches, with robots and "A.I." to do all the menial labor like scrubbing the toilets.
They're literally going to HAVE to. They will have no choice. But it won't be much. It'll probably make current food stamp allotments look like lottery winnings. There will be hungry, depressed, suicidal people strung out on drugs to cope etc. It's going to be quite dystopian if we head down the road we're on.
I hope Iran wins the war! And for the problem with dictatorship or more precisely crony capitalsim, everywhere not just in the US: In antiquity and the Middle Ages there was an easy solution for that: regicide! It's time to continue this tradition. But killing the king (Trump for example) will not do anything, of course you would have to kill thousands of involved people.
I fully believe the capitalist class needs to be abolished. The means of production should lie not with billionaires nor with the state, but with the workers directly. Co-ops have already proven their viability. Any business above a certain size, including publicly-traded corporations, ought to be reorganized into worker-owned co-ops. Get a little workplace democracy up in here. Let the CEOs come from the ranks of proletariat, and be someone who could be subject to a recall if they do a bad job. The buck should always stop with the people doing all the work.
You do realize that something like 7 in 10 US citizens know he's a tyrant, a war criminal, pedophile, rapist and murder (the polling shows this to be the case) right? That he does NOT represent even close to the majority of us? And that there WILL be a real leader again, someone who will actually, you know, care about our relationships abroad?
Things are messy right now, but come November, that mess is going to start getting cleaned up.
Donald Trump whether you like it or not, represents the United States and it's people.
The USA democratic process elected him.
The USA democratic process made him the nations representative.
Yes he is a criminal. Yes he is corrupt. That's the USA's problem, not the rest of the worlds.
But as an Australian... I firmly believe as a nation we should cut ties to the USA, cut our defense deals, remove American military from our soil and build stronger relations with other middle powers like Canada, South Korea whilst maintaining strong ties with the UK/Europe.
There is a significant Anti-USA sentiment across the entire planet currently... And for good reason... The USA will eventually end up alone.
The rest of the western world might be able to eventually break free from the USA, maybe, but not anytime soon.
Canada however isn't because it's screwed. Brain drain here has always been a problem and keeps getting much worse year after year. Most go the the USA.
Our military is quite weak overall and internal recruiting has gone so poorly the Gov is recruiting externally now because the type of Canadians worthy of joining the military won't, and it's no surprise.
The USA will simply do what's necessary to keep Canada in line, to a reasonable degree, and worst case, will just take Canada eventually if need be because it's getting easier by the day for that to occur.
If Americas worldwide outlook doesn't change much, the USA ending up alone because the west turns away from them might cause even worse problems, because then, from a certain perspective, Trump would be proven right about the 'loyalty and true intentions' of so called allies, turning them into enemies.
We don't have any reliance on the USA to function.
We make our own pharmaceuticals.
We are a minerals resource super power. (With strong leverage with Critical/Rare Earths)
We have our own gas supply.
We have historically partnered with the USA for military support, but the USA needs us more for that, than we need them in order to project power into the Pacific and Asia.
We have economically had stronger ties to China than the USA as well... And that isn't going to ever change if the USA keeps being hostile towards it's allies.
This is like saying that you don't want to do business with Germany or Japan, because nearly 100 years ago, they were a part of the axis. It's illogical and makes no sense. We are an ally. We are being held hostage by an evil conman that tricked our people. We are hurting, and with little recourse until November. We don't want this war, we don't want this president, we don't want his tariffs or policies... much in the same way that German's quickly didn't want what Hitler was doing back in the day.
If you cut ties with us, then what are you going to do when he flush this SOB out of office and regain normality? It's foolish and nearsighted.
The United States might be an ally.
But not at the moment.
They are hostile.
They are screwing over the entire planet... And as such... As a nation we are forming stronger ties with other nations to reduce dependence on the USA... If a country has screwed us over once, they can potentially screw us over again, so we need to diversify our relations.
And that is exactly what is happening.
"Friendly nations" don't screw over true friends/allies.
What happened with Germany/Japan was extremely unfortunate... Australia actually has very minimal involvement with those countries anyway.
And it took half a century for us to form reliable relations with those countries in the first instance, but we don't have all our eggs in those baskets either.
And what will we do when we cut ties with the USA? We will form stronger alliances with other powers... Which we have done with South Korea, Canada and other nations in the Asia Pacific.
But we have also formed stronger economic ties to Europe, India and China, we make more money from them (and they from us) than the USA, they are our economic partners.
Militarily, we are the dominant power in our region, the USA actually needs us, more than we need them... As a vast inhospitable continent, we are impossible/costly to invade.
We also have strong relations with New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua, Singapore and more which act as a buffer between us and aggressors as well.
So the real question is... Why should we stick with the USA who screws over it's allies? We don't actually need them.
Trump is the voted representative of the United States of America.
Trump is American. Trump is what America currently stands for.
It is your democracy at work.
And it's not like the USA has only voted him in once by accident, it's actually the second time.
Australia and USA are not as close as they used to be... And nor should they with the blatant disregard and disrespect to us as a nation by an intolerant, untrustworthy and hostile nation.
All thanks to AI and Adolf Tariff.
Not to mention voters with a huge persecution complex against 8.5 billion other people, including hundreds of millions of their own countrymen.
They're too stupid to vote.
I am picking one up today, my advice to everyone would be to do the same.
I was gonna wait for a Pro model... but at this rate I might as well fold.
Cant have Sony hogging all the glory
Nah. It doesn't HAVE to do (but it probably will).
Nintendo uses a slower RAM at a lower amount...
Even if their contracts weren't set for 1-2 years out, they still wouldn't be nearly as impacted as PS, XB, or PC
Portable ram is more expensive then normal ram do you think they just use ram from the ps4 pro and shove it in the switch?
LPDDR5 has a good 15-20% price premium over regular DDR5.
But that's offset by the lower capacities in this instance verses the Playstation 5/Xbox Series S/X.
However at the moment... Cheap Ram simply doesn't exist, at all.
And NAND has inflated in price as well.
And with the volatility in the oil market... Which is used to produce the consoles shell, dock, LCD, silicon and more... It's not really helping either.
In short. Screw the USA.
Nintendo is terrified of doing it so early in the generation. My guess is they might discontinue the non-bundle switch 2 packs and eat the loss of giving a game away for free essentially (afterall, it’s just digital copies). Then early next year they’ll announce the switch 2 lite for $400 and raise the standard to $500
Sell the dock separately. I picked one up yesterday and it is simply something I play in bed.
Perfect time for a SW2 Home model.
Launch the Home model at the existing hybrid price while bumping up the hybrid $50-$100.
