Nintendo has provided a little more context for the high prices of the Switch 2 and its games, and the reason might surprise you. The Switch 2's reveal erupted in controversy after the console's starting price of $450 USD - along with the pricing of some of its games at $80 - was revealed. Many were quick to blame tariffs recently instituted in the United States, but as a matter of fact, those were never the sole cause.
According to an interview in Polygon with Nintendo's Vice President, Player & Product Experience Bill Trinen, this was a more complicated decision based on various economic factors. For one thing, he says, "inflation is affecting everything." That's certainly no lie, but perhaps more revealingly, he also notes that Nintendo considers "local market circumstances" in the territories where it releases games: "What are the market circumstances in different territories, how are things impacting those market circumstances, and what options do we have to try to appropriately price the product based on the local market circumstances?"
Larger Economic Factors Play Into Switch 2 Pricing
The Switch 2's Pricing Is A Complicated Decision
Inflation is definitely part of the cause here; Trinen notes that Donkey Kong Country, released in 1994, cost $59 at launch, saying "The price of video games has been very stable for a very long time." It seems game prices have ignored inflation for longer than most goods and services, even after the $70 standard pricing increase: when you adjust previous Mario Kart games for inflation, most of them would cost $80 today.
And again, tariffs were a subject of conversation when the Switch 2's price was first revealed: they were in the news, after all, and this seemed like the first consequence of their introduction. Nintendo's response, however, demonstrated quickly that tariffs had yet to be factored into the Switch 2's price.
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Shortly after the tariffs were actually implemented, Nintendo delayed Switch 2 preorders in the US while it took time to consider the impact of potential tariffs, while president Doug Bowser told The Verge, "Any previous tariffs were not factored into the price itself." In other words, the Switch 2 could wind up being even more expensive once tariffs are tacked on.
How Does Nintendo Decide How Much Individual Games Cost?
Pricing Gets Even More Complicated
So that sort of explains the Switch 2's pricing itself. If nothing else, it tells us that it's not based on a single factor, like tariffs or inflation, but instead takes all those and more into . But individual Switch 2 games were also subject to sticker shock, especially when it was revealed that would cost $80.
Inflation is part of the conversation there, but again, it's not the sole factor. Bill Trinen goes on to explain that the Switch 2's game pricing comes from a much more complicated set of decisions, considering not only economic factors, but also the content of each individual game: "What is the experience, and what are players going to enjoy out of this game? What is the length of the game — what’s the volume of the experience? How in-depth is it? And then we price appropriately based on what we think the value of that experience is."
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He uses Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Nintendo's first $70 game - as an example. So, at $80, his logic tells us that Nintendo is promising Mario Kart World will be as long, expansive, and in-depth - if not more so - than games like TOTK (or at least its Switch 1 version, since its Switch 2 version will also cost $80). Personally, I don't know about that one. I definitely get a lot of playtime out of Mario Kart games, but I typically only break them out on very specific occasions a few times a year.
So it won't hurt our wallets any less (in fact, with tariffs added, it may hurt even more), but at least we know this isn't an arbitrary decision. Still, rationalizing it might cool tempers, but it's going to be a tough sell for Switch 2 and many of its games as such a high price.
