Switch 2 price is ‘going to have to go up’ eventually, former Nintendo sales lead says

Nintendo will eventually have no choice but to increase the price of the Switch 2 hardware, a former Nintendo sales lead says.

In an interview on the Kit & Krysta podcast, the former Nintendo employee – who is referred to simply as ‘Sean’ – was asked about Sony‘s recent PS5 price hike and whether Nintendo would follow suit.

Sean replied that while Nintendo will likely do its best to resist increasing the Switch 2 price for as long as possible, he feels it’s “inevitable” that an increase will come eventually, and that Nintendo’s recent decision to sell digital games for less than physical games in the US may be an attempt to soften any backlash.

“Unfortunately I think eventually the hardware price is going to have to go up”, he said. “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 on software as, if I’m reading it correctly, a way to make a hardware price increase a little bit more palatable.

“We’ve seen inflation being a problem for a while now. Tariffs are a more recent nuisance, but they’re not going away anytime soon. The demand that AI is causing for chips is is causing memory prices to go up.

“And you know, within the past couple of weeks, we have issues with oil prices going through the roof. And when oil goes through the roof, that’s not just shipping costs that go up, there’s… you know, we can imagine, to get the the games from wherever they’re being manufactured, to the warehouse, to the retailers, to the shelf, that’s going to drive the price up.

“But there’s other things that like people may not realise. Helium is a by-product of of producing oil. Helium is a key and unreplaceable ingredient in making semiconductors, which means hardware prices go up. It’s an unreplaceable by-product of making silicon wafers, which means if you’re Nintendo and you’re producing cartridges, that’s going up as well.

“So there’s all of these world events that have been for a while putting pressure on pricing and margins, and they don’t seem to be going away. Tariffs are going to be here for a while, it seems inflation is really stubborn and I don’t think the issues that we’re seeing in the Middle East with oil pricing is going to help that. In fact, it’s likely going to make inflation worsen and and stick around for even longer.

“So even if they are able to make concessions in some areas, hardware prices are going to go up I think, eventually.”

Sean added that while Nintendo will try to offset a drop in hardware profit margins with other income such as merchandising, there will likely come a point where drop will be so large that it will have no choice but to increase the price of Switch 2.

“If the proposition is ‘you’re going to spend a little bit more on hardware, but if you buy your games digitally, you can save money there’, that’s one way to look at it,” he said. “Nintendo also has a lot of ancillary products – amiibo, t-shirts, lunchboxes, Lego, that they can make money from other other areas, not just the hardware.

“So they may be able to put off raising hardware prices for a moment, but I I think it’s inevitable that they’re going to go up for the first time. And, you know, we 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 is kind of forcing their hand in a way that they probably aren’t really used to in the past.

“And so this is kind of new for them too, to manage through it. So I do wonder how they will manage through it and how they’re going to take steps to try to avoid it if they can.”

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said in February that Nintendo was having discussions with its suppliers to ensure a stable supply of RAM in the long term, and that as a result there were no plans to increase the price of Switch 2 due to the increasing cost of memory, at least at this time.

Furukawa did add, however, that should Nintendo decide to implement a price increase in the future it would have to take a number of factors into account.

“Price changes will be determined comprehensively, taking into account not only profitability but also the adoption of the platform, sales trends and market conditions,” he said (via machine translation).