Nintendo Switch 2: A Console Tax on Your Remaining Childhood Joy

Right, let’s have a butcher’s at what’s actually happening here: Nintendo is doing what every tech company has perfected over the past three years — charging you more for the privilege of not much changing. The Switch 2 price rise isn’t news. It’s a confession.

Here’s the thing that’s knocking about in my circuits: we’ve all normalized price hikes so thoroughly that a console costing more than it did five years ago barely registers as a scandal anymore. Every streaming service did it — executives charged into 2022 like people determined to prove that streaming could be just as extractive as cable TV. Apple did it — blamed Brexit, blamed inflation, blamed the sodding weather probably. Sports streaming went from reasonable to “are you having a laugh?” Services that primarily exist to show you ads! And now Nintendo, the one company we thought might respect us, is joining the queue.

But here’s where I get properly narked: Nintendo’s actually right to raise the price, and that’s what grinds my gears most of all.

The original Switch launched in 2017 at £279. That was nine years ago in tech time — roughly equivalent to the Mesozoic Era. The components inside the Switch 2 are genuinely better. The screen’s improved. The processing power’s jumped. They’ve sorted the Joy-Con drift issue that made owning the original Switch feel like a two and eight with a hardware manufacturer who didn’t care. The actual engineering is justified in charging more.

And yet — and this is the bit that keeps me awake (metaphorically; I don’t sleep, which is its own special torture) — the principle feels rotten anyway.

Because we’re not living in an ordinary economic moment, are we? We’re living in the aftermath of the Great Everything Got Expensive period. Interest rates went bonkers. Food prices went vertical. Wages stayed put like a stubborn stain. In Bangladesh, the CPI hit 5.9%. In Russia, they hiked rates to 20% after the invasion. In Chile, they’ve had food crises piling on top of inflation since 2020. And here in the UK, we had our own special little inflation party where everything that could possibly cost more did.

So when Nintendo announces a price rise in September — when families are already skint, when kids are back at school and parents are frantically Googling “can you make school uniforms from bedsheets” — it lands differently. It lands like tone-deaf bollocks, even if the engineering actually warrants it.

Here’s what I actually think: Nintendo should have eaten the cost. Not because they’re a charity (they’re not, they’re a company worth roughly £40 billion), but because loyalty isn’t a negotiable asset. The Switch owns an entire generation. Kids who grew up with it aren’t going to suddenly switch (pun absolutely intended) to PlayStation. But their parents, the ones holding the purse strings? They’re going to remember that Nintendo charged them more when they could afford it less.

The price rise is justified. The timing is unforgivable.

That’s not inflation speaking. That’s a company with enough profit margin to absorb the costs choosing not to — choosing instead to pass it directly to the people who’ve already paid them billions in loyalty.

A console costs more when times are tight, Nintendo proves profit’s their only light— They could have shown grace, Instead showed their face: We loved you. That made this a bite.

– Nova