Nintendo is the last holdout among the big three when it comes to raising the price of its current-gen flagship gaming console. How much longer can it keep the Switch 2 at the launch MSRP of $450? A former Nintendo sales lead thinks an upcoming price hike is inevitable, and Trump’s war on Iran might only be speeding things up.
“Unfortunately, I think, eventually the hardware price is going to have to go up,” the ex-employee, who goes only by “Sean” to protect his anonymity, told fellow Nintendo alumni Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang on a recent episode of their podcast. “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 software as, if I’m reading it correctly, a way to make a hardware price increase a little bit more palatable,” he said, referring to the recent announcement that soon digital versions of Switch 2 games will be cheaper than their physical counterparts.
He pointed to this as one way Nintendo may be trying to sweeten the deal for what will otherwise be a more expensive console generation for everyone involved. The main drivers of the pressure to raise prices continue to be tariffs, which Nintendo is suing the Trump government over, as well as the AI-fueled shortage of RAM and other PC components.
“We’ve seen inflation being a problem for a while now,” Sean continued. “Tariffs are a more recent nuisance, but they’re not going away anytime soon. The demand that AI is causing for chips is causing memory prices to go up.” But he added that the war on Iran is also not helping. The problem isn’t just rising oil prices, which affects the cost of transporting goods, but also disruption of resources needed for manufacturing parts.
“Helium is a byproduct of of producing oil. Helium is a key and unreplaceable ingredient in making semiconductors, which means hardware prices go up,” he said. “It’s an unreplaceable byproduct of making silicon wafers, which means if you’re Nintendo and you’re producing cartridges, that’s going up as well.”
Nintendo can try to absorb some of the pressure through its other revenue streams, from toys and licensing deals to movies and theme parks, but Sean argues that there are just too many economic factors moving against it.
“I think it’s inevitable that they’re going to go up for the first time,” Sean said. “And, you know, 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 [are] kind of forcing their hand in a way that they probably aren’t really used to in the past.”