What will the Nintendo Switch 2 cost? Console price history may tell us

Nintendo didn’t get into much in the way of details during this week’s reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2, and there are few details around a console’s launch as important as the price. The omission of course has everyone, ourselves included, wondering how the Big N is going to play its hand this time.

Video game consoles aren’t like traditional, commodity consumer electronics launches — each time a company like Nintendo launches a new console, it is doing so in an entirely different environment. Everything from macroeconomic conditions — hi, inflation! — to the demographics and total addressable market for their products — hi, Gen Alpha — to the massive swings in gaming habits — uhh, all of Fortnite? — can shift from one console generation to the other. I mention all of this to be clear: Historical context can only provide so much guidance. With that said, let’s dig in!

Here’s a chart of Nintendo console releases in the U.S., organized chronologically, with the original launch price and the price adjusted for inflation using the U.S. government’s Consumer Price Index inflation calculator.

If you squint your eyes at the column of inflation-adjusted prices, you can see a pattern start to emerge around the time the Nintendo 64 is released, and that pattern looks something like three hundred and ninety-nine dollars. My colleague Oli Welsh put a big circle around this number before I even shared this data with him. Here he is earlier today:

The Switch 2 is unlikely to be priced any lower than $349, the current cost of an OLED Switch model. $399 seems like a safe bet — the same price as the base Steam Deck. Any more than this and Nintendo will face uncomfortable comparisons to the new wave of PC handhelds.

Starting with the release of the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Nintendo’s pricing strategy has been to undercut the competition. The Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn arrived a year earlier priced at $299 and $399 respectively, while the Nintendo 64 came in at just $199.

Its follow-up console, the GameCube, debuted in 2001 at $199 against newcomer Xbox at $299. Both of those consoles were competing against the current all-time-sales console champ, the PlayStation 2, whose October 2000 release at $299 was significant enough that it straight-up put Sega out of the hardware business. Despite the numeric symmetry of its 1999 release of the Dreamcast (on 9/9/99) at $199, and its library of critically acclaimed games, Sega killed the Dreamcast in March of 2001.

The Wii famously went head-to-head against the far more expensive PS3 in 2006, coming in at literally half the price of Sony’s overengineered $499 box. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 debuted the year prior, with the so-called Core model coming in at a relatively reasonable $299, but Nintendo’s novel alternative managed to best both the 360 and PS3 in the long run. Stories of the Wii being tough to snag at retail lasted literal years.

Of course, winning on price isn’t a recipe for success. Look no further than the Wii U, the ill-fated follow-up to Nintendo’s runaway hit. Despite a somewhat accessible $299 asking price, the clumsy offering failed to excite players the way the Wii did, and the following year, the $399 PlayStation 4 managed to steamroll both the Wii U and the Xbox One.

The off-cycle release of the Nintendo Switch — just a little over four years after failing to maintain the Wii’s momentum with the Wii U — has put Nintendo in an altogether different position, in which it doesn’t have to launch alongside console competitors whose products, and prices, are increasingly distinct from what Nintendo is doing. The Switch was released in 2017, over three years after the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and three years before the release of their successors in 2020. This of course makes an apples-to-apples comparison of pricing strategy difficult, because Nintendo isn’t competing with the 2013 launch price of its competition, but rather the 2017 retail price, post-price cuts and manufacturing efficiencies.

At a price of $299, the Switch was only able to match the pricing of the new PS4 Slim and Xbox One S models; nevertheless, the Switch was a hit right out of the gate and now, nearly eight years later, it still commands that exact same $299 asking price. Similarly, the Nintendo Switch 2 will launch alongside the over 4-year-old PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles, whose pricing starts at $449, or the cheaper Xbox Series S, which starts at just $299.

So, where does the Nintendo Switch 2 land? At $399, just under the price of the current console kings, and well under the $699 price of the PS5 Pro? Or do they match their $449 starting price, confident that the owners of the 146 million Switch consoles out there are on their upgrade timeline and not on Sony and Microsoft’s? Or maybe the real competition this time around isn’t the console competitors, but the Steam Deck, whose $399 asking price nets you access to a storefront that, while obviously lacking Nintendo games, is larger than any console out there?