What will the Nintendo Switch 2 cost? Console price history can tell us

Nintendo didn’t go into much detail in this week’s reveal about the Nintendo Switch 2, and there were few details surrounding the console’s main announcement as well as price. . The elimination of course has everyone, ourselves included, wondering how Big N will play his hand this time.

Video game consoles are not like traditional, portable electronic devices – every time a company like Nintendo announces a new console, it does so in a different environment. Absolutely. Everything from macroeconomic conditions – hello, inflation! – for the general public and all the business addresses for their products – hello, Gen Alpha – for the big competition in the game – uhh, all of Fortnite? – can switch from one console generation to another. I say all this very clearly: historical context can only provide so much guidance. With that said, let’s dig in!

Here’s a list of Nintendo console releases in the US, organized by time, with starting price and price adjusted for inflation. The US government’s Consumer Price Index inflation calculator.

If you squint your eyes at the line of inflation-adjusted rates, you can see a pattern starting to emerge around the time the Nintendo 64 was released, and that pattern looks something like . three hundred and ninety nine dollars. My colleague Oli Welsh put a big circle around this number before I even gave him this information. Here it was earlier today:

The Switch 2 is unlikely to cost less than $349, the current price of the standard OLED Switch. $399 seems like a safe bet – the same price as the base Steam. More than this and Nintendo will face an uncomfortable comparison to the new wave of PC handhelds.

Beginning with the release of the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Nintendo’s pricing strategy dominated the competition. The Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn arrived a year earlier at a price of $299 and $399 respectively, while the Nintendo 64 arrived at only $199.

Its retro console, the GameCube, debuted in 2001 at $199 against the new Xbox at $299. Both of these consoles competed against the current all-time-selling console champ, the PlayStation 2, whose Ten The 2000 release at $299 was significant enough that it directly put Sega out of the hardware business. Despite the symmetry of its 1999 release of the Dreamcast (on 9/9/99) at $199, and its library of incredible games, Sega killed the Dreamcast in March 2001 .

The Wii famously went head to head against the most expensive PS3 in 2006, by half the price of Sony’s overengineered $499 box. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was introduced last year, with the so-called Core model from a reasonable price of $299, but Nintendo’s innovation has managed to dominate the 360 ​​and PS3 for a long time. Wii consoles are hard to snag at retail stores over the years.

Of course, winning at a price is not a recipe for success. Look no further than the Wii U, the ill-fated pursuit of Nintendo’s escape. Despite the somewhat accessible $299 asking price, the lackluster offering didn’t do as well for gamers as the Wii did, and the following year, the $399 PlayStation 4 managed to make it both Wii U and Xbox One.

The release of the Nintendo Switch – just a little over four years after failing to match the Wii’s power with the Wii U – has put Nintendo in a completely different position, which it did not need to release with console competitors whose products, and prices, are different from what Nintendo does. The Switch was released in 2017, over three years after the release of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and three years before the release of their successors in 2020. This has finally made an apple- six-apples comparison of pricing strategies is difficult, because Nintendo is not competing with the 2013 starting price of its competition, but with the 2017 sales price, after-sales and production goods.

At a price of $299, the Switch can only match the price of the new PS4 Slim and Xbox One S models; However, the Switch was a hit out of the gate and now, nearly eight years later, it still commands exactly the same $299 asking price. Similarly, the Nintendo Switch 2 will be announced alongside the more than 4-year-old PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, whose prices start at $449, or the cheaper Xbox Series S, which starts at $299 only.

So, where does the Nintendo Switch 2 land? At $399, just under the price of the current console king, and well under the $699 price of the PS5 Pro? Or do they match their starting price of $449, confident that the owners of the 146 million Switch consoles out there are on their upgrade schedule and not on Sony and Microsoft’s? Or maybe the real competition this time is not the console competitors, but the Steam Deck, whose $399 asking price nets you access to a store that, when obviously there is no Nintendo games, bigger than a console out?