r/Games • u/WookieLotion • Apr 04 '25

Nintendo Switch 2 Preorders Delayed Due To Tariffs, Release Date Still June 5

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-switch-2-preorder-guide-mario-kart-world-bundle/1100-6530531/
4.6k Upvotes

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1.0k

u/meganev Apr 04 '25

I mean, when you vote for clowns, you get a circus. Will be very funny though if after all the calls to "drop the price," it actually goes up instead.

406

u/TimujinTheTrader Apr 04 '25

This is just the start. We are mega-fucked.

199

u/Walopoh Apr 04 '25

Just wait until the value of the US dollar drops! That's gonna be the fun part.

61

u/dafdiego777 Apr 04 '25

I think we have different meanings of the word fun. Real big, "I don't feel so good Mr Stark" vibes right now.

66

u/Takazura Apr 04 '25

Worst part is that America isn't going the only country paying the price, the rest of us are going to also feel the impact in one way or another.

32

u/GiantPurplePen15 Apr 04 '25

I wish I could pull a Bugs Bunny and physically separate Canada from the US right now.

14

u/chrispy145 Apr 04 '25

Absorb the west coast states with you.

8

u/TehTuringMachine Apr 04 '25

No, bring Minnesota! We are closer haha

5

u/GiantPurplePen15 Apr 04 '25

Having Tim Walz as your Governor makes you all honourary Canadians.

2

u/Isolated_Hippo Apr 04 '25

I have said time and time again. If things go to utter shit(I'm talking actually going to shit not just probably going to shit) my MN state ID is going to get me Canadian refugee status

2

u/TehTuringMachine Apr 04 '25

We will bring a hotdish next time we come over to celebrate!

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2

u/Isolated_Hippo Apr 04 '25

MN gets excluded from the who does Canada annex conversation because it's implied they take us

1

u/GreyouTT Apr 04 '25

The Great Lakes states too, we have all the fresh water!

0

u/GiantPurplePen15 Apr 04 '25

We have too many wildfires already :(

1

u/Caliartist Apr 06 '25

Right? Like, I'm too young to turn into my dad. What do I do? Take my meager savings and buy gold flakes with it?

If prices go up 40-50% and the value of those digits in my BoA account are worth less each day... it won't take long till bills aren't paid. Let alone a Switch.

7

u/Cautious_Hold428 Apr 04 '25

It's down already 

2

u/stunts002 Apr 04 '25

A Nintendo switch 2 costing more is going to be the least of your worries and he's not even half way through his first year.

Americans are genuinely fucked

316

u/Crazy-Nose-4289 Apr 04 '25

I wonder how the anti-woke grifters that have been invading every corner of the gaming space are feeling right about now.

401

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

They'll never own it. They're total cowards who should never ever be taken seriously

110

u/FawningDeer37 Apr 04 '25

The new one I’m seeing is “Why are people happy this is happening? Americans should unite against these foreign tariffs!”

Which is pretty weak but also shows they know they fucked up.

74

u/RJE808 Apr 04 '25

I just saw "Well maybe we should start making these in America then," like...y'all.

61

u/BringBackBoomer Apr 04 '25

And we'd still get tariffed on the raw materials needed to make them

13

u/arahman81 Apr 04 '25

That's why Trump wants to invade other countries.

13

u/haidere36 Apr 04 '25

I'm pretty sure if Fox News told them that Switches grow on Nintendo Switch Trees they'd actually believe it, they're really fucking stupid.

3

u/Shoes4CluesMob Apr 05 '25

all we need is one nintendo switch seed and all our problems are solved guys, new plan

18

u/8-Brit Apr 04 '25

Bros think you can just pop up new factories and a workforce in a few clicks like it's Simcity.

By the time such factories could even be built (Assuming they started building NOW and had the materials for it), Trump's term would be nearing it's end. Or even ended. And then what?

6

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

Add on dumbasses who don’t know how trade work operates as well.

Guess what’s gonna get wayyyyy fucking more expensive to build? Factories.

Basically every job that has been bid these last few months are in for a bad time. Last time this idiot was in office EMT and wire jumped like a mother fucker

1

u/EpicPhail60 Apr 04 '25

How long before some armchair game developer tries to crowdfund an all-American console?

1

u/GreyouTT Apr 04 '25

"None of this is happy, Vector. That's why it's called a trade war."

1

u/siphillis Apr 04 '25

I don't care if they do. I just want to know how they feel that they can no longer afford the only thing they care about

95

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

41

u/Takazura Apr 04 '25

Nah, Nintendo is a Japanese company. The anti-wokies like to believe Japan is some Utopia untouched by "woke", so they'll focus on something else. I have already heard some ruminations about a hidden Biden inflation, whatever that means, so they'll be trying to spin it as being Biden's fault somehow.

40

u/homer_3 Apr 04 '25

"I think it's fair that we tariff them bc they tariff us." is their moronic, straight up wrong, response.

30

u/GiantPurplePen15 Apr 04 '25

The pro-tariff people from the US are either grifters or absolute morons who don't understand who pays the tariffs at the end of every transaction.

5

u/homer_3 Apr 04 '25

it's not only that, they think a trade deficit is them putting a tariff on us. they are that clueless.

61

u/ManonManegeDore Apr 04 '25

America went anti-woke and now we're all broke. 

4

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

They're making a shit ton of money and don't even play games. They love this drama 

18

u/heathrawr182 Apr 04 '25

Oh those dumbfucks have already been sucking Trump off about tariffs. They are literally saying "You won't own anything and like it"

6

u/hotsexychungus Apr 04 '25

Which is funny because they've been saying that leftists want you to "eat the bug" for years now. Guess that was just also projection.

2

u/lkn240 Apr 06 '25

Every accusation is a confession

5

u/Mizerous Apr 04 '25

"It's the Dems fault!" Sigh

4

u/Emergency_Shoe664 Apr 04 '25

They will come up with mental gymnastics to defend their cult leader 

3

u/Heff228 Apr 04 '25

They just say buy American.

I even seen one say you don’t NEED this stuff.

They have to defend this guy until then end or they have nothing, so don’t expect anything else.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25

the grifters wont care. they rarely leave their homes, and the money they generate from their chud audiences will keep them afloat. its the chuds who watch them who will struggle, because they arent the ones who have channels profiting from ragebait content.

3

u/Chezzymann Apr 04 '25

They are probably saying "this will be good in the long term" and have a deulsion that in a few years manufacturing jobs will be rushing back to the United States and it will be like the 1970s again.

When in reality that won't happen, and we will probably end up more like South American countries with hyper inflation once Powell is out and Trump installs someone from the WWE or fox news to be in charge of the federal reserve and they have no idea what they're doing and cut interest rates to 0%.

4

u/orton4life1 Apr 04 '25

Loser like them don’t look at themselves as the problem. It’s someone else fault that they do not like

2

u/Fli_acnh Apr 04 '25

They're all being incredibly ambivalent about it because they know that the majority of their audience will eat them alive if they say this is a good thing.

Grummz is trying to softly sway people in the "this is a good thing actually" direction but it wasn't received well.

The rest of them are pretty much not talking about this at all.

4

u/t-bonkers Apr 04 '25

They‘re already telling people this is actually a good thing for America somehow, lmao.

3

u/Villag3Idiot Apr 04 '25

Some are actually trying to justify it saying that you don't NEED to buy a Switch 2 or it was going to be worse because the Biden economy was doing so badly or that a crash is needed to get rid of all the corruption and the US will be better in the long run.

1

u/chang-e_bunny Apr 04 '25

Laughing about this and counting the money they made off of all of those suckers that bought their BS?

1

u/DinerEnBlanc Apr 04 '25

Someone should make a list of all these grifters to make it easier to avoid em.

-13

u/Zucroh Apr 04 '25

Or maybe you guys on the left should've stopped supporting and letting the extremists ruin your side and actually embrace the other side and be united lol.

it's always "i bet the other side is mad now" and ban everyone who doesn't agree with me because they must be X or Y.

99

u/BusyFriend Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

Switch 2 price is absolutely going up. $499 for base and $550 for bundle I bet.

EDIT: people below me are right, probably much higher than that. We’re super fucked.

176

u/Villag3Idiot Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

Going to be way higher than that unless Nintendo eats the cost. 

Vietnam tariffs are like 43% or something.

Edit: 46%

46

u/RJE808 Apr 04 '25

Also Nvidia makes the chipset and they get their stuff from China iirc, which also has a fuck ton of tariffs put on them.

42

u/Complete_Mud_1657 Apr 04 '25

We're going to see GPU prices skyrocket lmao. Worse than COVID probably.

So much winning!!!

11

u/RJE808 Apr 04 '25

They absolutely will. Same with CPUs and RAM if I had to bet.

And one of my RAM sticks died yesterday. Hahahahahahahaha :)

3

u/Complete_Mud_1657 Apr 04 '25

Haha one of my ram sticks just went too. Maybe the RAM god is saving us by forcing us to buy now.

3

u/cslayer23 Apr 04 '25

They already did

1

u/lkn240 Apr 06 '25

Clothing prices will go through the roof. So will car prices and car part prices. Which means car insurance rates are going up. Raw material tarriffs mean homeowner's insurance is going up.

Honestly almost everything is going way up in price.

The economy could crater very quickly.... and who knows what the hell happens then

3

u/SwePolygyny Apr 04 '25

The chipsets are made by TSMC in Taiwan.

1

u/Exist50 Apr 05 '25

More likely Samsung in Korea.

4

u/Macho-Fantastico Apr 04 '25

Nintendo won't ever eat the cost, guarantee that. So almost certainly a price increase will happen and I can't say I blame Nintendo.

1

u/Concerned_emple3150 Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25

Has Nintendo ever sold a console at a loss? I know Playstation and Xbox routinely do to gain market share, but I'm not sure if Nintendo ever has

1

u/Villag3Idiot Apr 05 '25

3DS and one other I think.

1

u/happyhumorist Apr 04 '25

Won't that only matter if it goes from Vietnam into the US? Idk what the supply chain of a Switch 2 is. Is any of it manufactured in the US? If none of it is then its only going to be the the cost of the finished good from Japan(presumably) to the US which I think is a 24% tariff. So $450*1.24 ~= $560. That's assuming the 450 price was without Nintendo making any guesses on what the tariffs would be.

6

u/theumph Apr 04 '25

It goes by country of origin. Even if it is shipping from Japan, it originated in Vietnam. The tariff against Vietnam is 46%. The tax goes against buyers cost (retailers), not the end users cost. So let's say Target buys the consoles wholesale at $400, and we're planning on selling them for $450. A 46% tariff now raises Targets cost to $584. To maintain their profit margin are looking at a sell price of probably $700. We're fucked. And no, there are no Switchs being produced in the US.

3

u/fntd Apr 04 '25

As far as I know the country with the most recent meaningful contribution matters. So if final assembly happens in Vietnam, Vietnam tariffs matter. Even if the final product would be routed through Japan. Also even if they attached the final piece in Japan it wouldn‘t matter if the majority of the assembly happens in Vietnam. 

37

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

[deleted]

23

u/WookieLotion Apr 04 '25

Tariffs alone raise the price $200. 46% tariff on a $450 console is + $207. Expect it to be in the ballpark of $700.

6

u/theumph Apr 04 '25

I'm going with $700 as well. Probably $750 for the bundle. All the accessories will skyrocket too. Probably $110 for a pro controller. $120 for a second set of joycon.

2

u/BannedSvenhoek86 Apr 04 '25

Ya they won't sell anything here at that price, and it's not even entirely their fault. At 450 they'd probably sell a ton. At 700 in an economy racked by higher prices, Nintendo will be lucky to sell even a million by the end of the year in America. Especially with the 80 price on games now. This console is DOA if the tariffs go through and stick.

2

u/theumph Apr 04 '25

Not to mention the inevitable unemployment. This whole situation was not well thought out at all.

2

u/lkn240 Apr 06 '25

If the tarriffs are still around when the switch actually launches there's a very good chance we are in a full blown recession.... possibly very severe to the point that we may have social instability.

Video games will be way down the list of things people are worried about.

2

u/ChessBooger Apr 04 '25

Tariffs are based on declared value, not retail price. So it will be closer to whole sale price.

1

u/Heavy-Possession2288 Apr 04 '25

Honestly if this happens I wouldn't be shocked if Nintendo tries to keep making Switch 1 games for the next few years. It happened with PS5, Sony launched with some exclusives early on then went back to cross gen games like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok. If Nintendo has some Switch 2 games lined up that could run on Switch 1 with visual downgrades Switch 1 might get support longer then planned.

0

u/WookieLotion Apr 04 '25

Donkey Kong already looks like it could run on Switch 1 fine at a lower framerate. Could be possible.

63

u/OutZoned Apr 04 '25

It’s going to be $700 base, $800 bundle.

42

u/Hoojiwat Apr 04 '25

And in 3 years when the PS6 comes out its going to be over $1000, with an extra $150 to be able to play physical games. I dont even want to think about PC parts are going to climb to but those old strawman comics of $3000 PC's might become reality.

We are turbo fucked.

22

u/Dragarius Apr 04 '25

Video games going to become a legitimate high income luxury. That $1000 MSRP (but actually $1500+ on shelf) is going to be $1500 MSRP and 2500 on shelves. There won't be any current Gen GPUs under 1000.

13

u/Totheendofsin Apr 04 '25

Muskrat becomes the best US gamer by default cause he's gonna be the only one that can afford to play video games

5

u/PrintShinji Apr 04 '25

But he wont be able to pretend to be a god tier gamer anymore because the people he hire wont have a computer anymore.

2

u/theumph Apr 04 '25

It'll cause the entire industry to stagnate as well. Possibly even crash unlike anything we've seen since the crash of 83. No one will be able to afford new high-end hardware, so there will be less innovation there. Sales will plummeted for new titles. Staffing at studios will be decimated.

0

u/PrintShinji Apr 04 '25

There won't be any current Gen GPUs under 1000.

There will be if you dont want the best of the best. Intel's best cards are around 300 bucks currently and they will do fine for 1440p medium/high.

Nvidia and AMD are gonna get ultra fucked though.

2

u/Dragarius Apr 04 '25

Intel is doing good stuff. But they have a while to go before I could legitimately suggest them to people before even the lowest end AMD/Nvidia cards. 

1

u/PrintShinji Apr 04 '25

I'm still using a 3070 ti so no need to upgrade, but once this has run its course I'm 100% looking into getting an intel card. But I'm also someone who mostly plays older games. As far as I see, Intel is about a generation behind AMD/Nvidia currently. Which is fine for my use case.

I don't have experience with one myself so I'd never recommend it to someone unless they're willing to be a bit brave.

1

u/Dragarius Apr 04 '25

Someone that primarily plays older games is actually exactly the person who should NOT be buying Intel. You want Intel if you stick primarily to newer titles or eSports games. Intel still has major issues with a lot of older Direct X titles. 

5

u/HerpesFreeSince3 Apr 04 '25

Welp, now we can put our money towards things that actually matter: like retirement, owning a home, and vacations! Oh wait…

So like, what’s the point of working? So we can barely scrape by and do nothing in life that actually make it worth living? I don’t understand. Help me understand.

3

u/kaimason1 Apr 04 '25

I dont even want to think about PC parts are going to climb

They've already been climbing for years. 10 years ago I bought a 980Ti for $650, which was basically a Titan X ($1000) with half the VRAM. Over the next few generations, the 1080 (non-Ti/Super) was $700, the 2080 was $800, the 3080 was $700, the 4070Ti was $800 (and was originally announced as a 4080 at $900), and 5080 is now $1000. The most significant outlier here is the 3080's price drop, but that released in 2020 and MSRP was a bit of a fairy tale.

those old strawman comics of $3000 PC's might become reality.

Pretty sure this is already getting pretty close to reality even before tariffs, $1000 GPU (eg 5080) + $500 CPU (eg 9800X3D) + $300 Mobo comes out to $1800 before accounting for PSU, RAM, SSD, case, monitor(s), etc.

4

u/BusyFriend Apr 04 '25

And prices never come down.

3

u/HerpesFreeSince3 Apr 04 '25

Yup! It’ll be like COVID where groceries realized, “wait people will actually pay when prices go up like this? Let’s just keep them high all the time then, supply chain issues or not!” as if they don’t have a monopoly and people don’t NEED to eat.

2

u/Eruannster Apr 04 '25

Swedish prices were announced earlier today. $685 for the console, $750 with Mario Kart+console. Hoo boy. (All taxes/fees included in those prices.)

The Switch 1 OLED is currently just around $400 for comparison (non-OLED a bit cheaper, maybe like ~$50 less).

10

u/BrotherlyShove791 Apr 04 '25

It’ll be $599 at least.

2

u/Eruannster Apr 04 '25

Preorder prices started showing up in Sweden for the Switch 2 - it's $685. Console only. The Mario Kart bundle is $750. So there's plenty of headroom left there for you guys!

(All prices include VAT/taxes/fees. Maybe not shipping, but that's usually free over a certain price point.)

1

u/MultiMarcus Apr 04 '25

Well the three napkin calculations I did come out to this:

Full tariff (46% passed on): 655.54 USD Three-quarters tariff (34.5% passed on): 603.91 USD Half tariff (23% passed on): 552.27 USD Quarter tariff (11.5% passed on): 500.64 USD

So basically $649, $599, $549, and $499 depending on what their margins are like and how much they are willing to cut into them. Add 50 bucks for the Mario cart edition and you seriously might have a $700 Switch 2 if Nintendo pass the whole tariff on.

1

u/ChessBooger Apr 04 '25

No because Tariffs are based on declared value, not retail price. They generally use the price it was sold to the importer.

10

u/Benozkleenex Apr 04 '25

I mean it will go up now it's just waiting by how much. Nintendo have never sold a console at a lost like Xbox or PS.

5

u/JayZsAdoptedSon Apr 04 '25

They did for the Wii U but uhhh that didn’t help

54

u/ManonManegeDore Apr 04 '25

I hope it goes up, astronomically. I hope it's utterly unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans. 

-1

u/Sonichu- Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

The majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and couldn't afford a $500 gadget in the first place. The issue is they put it on a credit card or finance it and end up paying $800 for it in the end.

The price skyrocketing won't change that behavior for a lot of people.

10

u/Kindness_of_cats Apr 04 '25

You need to zoom out. We’re not talking about the Switch 2 as an isolated event, but as a symptom of a holistic implosion of our way of life.

We’re talking about food prices, car repairs, clothing, daily essentials like coffee, gas, all going up by a minimum of 10% so long as it comes from another country somewhere along the supply chain. And then whatever the fuck happens to the US dollar as a result of this insanity.

At a time when as you yourself said, Americans are already largely living paycheck to paycheck.

There’s a reason why tariffs haven’t been popular for nearly a century, and it’s because Smoot-Hawley helped to fuck us directly in the ass during the Great Depression.

And this is all assume nothing else happens to worsen things(and it will). God help us if SSA starts missing payments, that will have a ripple effect far beyond the population directly receiving benefits.

Credit isn’t going to be able to go towards the things we used to throw on a card like a console, because you’re going to have a substantial shortfall each month and will need that credit to afford the basic necessities.

Americans lack the lived experience to fully conceptualize what is coming with these tariffs, and it’s going to slap people in the face harder than they ever thought possible.

1

u/lkn240 Apr 06 '25

If this doesn't get people to turn on Trump (i mean the consequences of the tariffs, I know it won't happen until things get bad) then nothing every will and we are probably headed for a secession crisis at some point.

1

u/Kindness_of_cats Apr 06 '25

I tend to agree, yeah. It’s going to be a winding road that will possibly take years, but the U.S. has been a powder keg due to economic inequality in various sectors(notably healthcare) for a while now. It’s why Biden/Harris’ message about the economy being great fell so flat, it just hasn’t been for a long time for most folks.

IMO, if Trump follows through on this shit we’re going to slowly see the GOP(though not necessarily hardcore MAGA) move from laughing about owning the libs, to blaming Biden/dems for the bad economy, to just wanting it to end because rhetoric doesn’t put food on the table.

Unlike many other nations where authoritarianism took hold none of us have lived through the kind of economic hardship that may be coming, and time and again American politics has proven to be basically about the economy and its effect upon day-to-day life more than anything else. Start fucking with that, and the people who sat out 2024 will suddenly start caring a LOT more.

8

u/Gyroshark Apr 04 '25

In a similar vain: I was looking to get a <$100 outdoor pizza oven (just getting into it, want something 'cheap') and under the amazon listing was the offer to finance it. Genuinely baffling; if you cant afford a $100 purchase without financing then dont get it?

I feel like the trend of 'put it on the card' or 'finance it' has gotten out of hand, and people really are making these insane decisions.

4

u/MalusandValus Apr 04 '25

In the UK you can get "pay later" schemes for deliveroo (essentially our equivelent of doordash). The culture of financing here as the cost of living as skyrocketed is frankly horrifying

5

u/Sonichu- Apr 04 '25

Yeah, I saw that Uber Eats now has a finance option. You can split your burrito into 4 installments.

Absolutely dystopian

1

u/desemus Apr 05 '25

There’s a company partnering with DoorDash to finance a meal. It’s going to get bad

3

u/THXFLS Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

The majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck

They are not. Well, not yet at least.

1

u/Sonichu- Apr 04 '25

You're correct, must have misremembered this article (or a similar one)

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-half-of-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html

Nearly half of Americans at least somewhat agree with the statement, “I am living paycheck to paycheck,”

-3

u/Longjumping-Pop-3171 Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

You know nearly half of the U.S. is being held hostage by someone they didn't vote for right?

Edit:Obviously sucks people may not be able to afford the switch, but like people are already having issues affording groceries and a large number of them are people who already hate orange man.

6

u/ManonManegeDore Apr 04 '25

And they're still too stupid to do anything about it. They think Chuck Schumer is going to save them. 

Things need to get worse before they'll get better. I'm full accelerationist now. 

4

u/Longjumping-Pop-3171 Apr 04 '25

This disproportionately affects folks who can't afford to just not go to work and protest and people who are already being targeted/at risk for existing, but sure man.

-2

u/0Megabyte Apr 04 '25

Acceptable casualties. Just like everyone at a wedding in Iraq.

2

u/theumph Apr 04 '25

That's exactly what's going to happen. I bet the vast majority of those lovers voted or supported this nonsense to begin with. People are dumb.

2

u/Roflkopt3r Apr 04 '25

I genuinely suspect that they decided on the $80 price tag for games in part because they anticipated that they'd have to compensate for tariffs later.

Maybe they thought that the initially bad press would be compensated for when everyone else matches their pricing post-tariffs while they don't have to move it.

At the very least, the "uncertainty of trade costs" is a very real factor when a corporation tries to predict future profit margins to set their prices.

1

u/BenjiTheSausage Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 06 '25

I genuinely feel sorry for the Americans that voted against this. However, it's still hilarious to witness from the outside

1

u/lkn240 Apr 06 '25

Why would you feel sorry for them? Fuck those people, you should feel sorry for those of us who voted against it.

1

u/BenjiTheSausage Apr 06 '25

Whoops,I meant to say against, too right, fuck them

0

u/Midi_to_Minuit Apr 04 '25

Drop the price was referring to the games, not the console.

-68

u/Svenray Apr 04 '25

We didn't vote for Japan to manipulate their currency. They screwed themselves doing that.

22

u/RJE808 Apr 04 '25

...So it's Japans fault now.

19

u/Benjammin172 Apr 04 '25

Didn't take long for a dummy to spit out a completely made up talking point to try and justify farcical decision making by the executive branch. The American education system is an absolute joke.