Three reasons: 1) It’s too bloody expensive. 2) Most people are scared to spend money right now. 3) The USA as a global superpower, is morphing into something decidedly more sinister.
Personally, I prefer not to be Nintendo because of Nintendo’s behavior, but the price is why they still struggle to sell these.
They sold a ton right out of the gate. Everyone that really wanted one already got one. After that, they need parents and grandparents to get them for the kids and that isn’t going to happen as much.
Nintendo was basically a “toy”. You could, for the most part, safely buy a Nintendo console for your kids at a somewhat reasonable price. (I know the OG consoles were a bit pricey).
You could buy your kid a handheld console for ~$200 or less. The Switch 1 was $300, but you could still get your kid a Lite for $200.
The biggest issue is the price. I remember a time when even the poorest kid in class had a Nintendo because it was cheap.
The last cheap Nintendo was the 2DS over a decade ago. Most parents are looking for cheap hardware with entertainment and there isn’t anything which comes close to it.
Even the switch lite is the same price as the PS3 bundle back in the day. And it came with 2 real controllers and a game.
I’m not the target audience for the switch 2, but i honestly wouldn’t buy it just because how shitty they are. They sold a tutorial game that should clearly be free. Donkey kong is like 80 dollars and just a month or 2 later they released a dlc for half the price. The games don’t even seem to be good. Mario kart is mediocre at best, metroid is embarrassing. And the company itself is pretty embarrassing itself with their lawsuit crusades
Yeah that’s the problem there’s nothing really compelling for it. Plus they’ve done their classic Nintendo thing of take a great product and then just add a bunch of gimmicks and claim innovation e.g the mouse mode thing nobody cares about. Also them being tight about the controllers and not putting decent hall effect even though they know they have a problem. It just proves that they don’t actually care about their customer base.
i was employed during the 1st switch launch(the one after oled) pokemon turned me off from the console game forever, also masuda made a point that pokemon will not get any better later on, because hes all burned out from the industry.
The main thing holding me back is the fact that it doesn’t have an OLED display. With the price hike between the original and 2, in my opinion it should’ve launched with an OLED as standard. When even cheap phones come with it, Nintendo has no excuse not to include one.
And the game prices also aren’t helping, I imagine. Not when the games themselves are lacklustre as well. The new Mario Kart should’ve been a system seller. But the people I know who own it, have reverted back to playing the previous version. That’s a baaaad look.
I’ll likely buy the Switch 2 when they launch an OLED and release a new Animal Crossing.
they are banking on 10 and under nagging on thier parents to buy the game cosole, they may only play few times a year. this was pretty much the craze of YUGIOH cards early 2000s, and pokemon in that same time period.
pokemon is likely thier flagship game, and the quality seems to have gone down with each new game coming out, per masuda, cant really justify a very expensive game like pokemon and a switch 2, besides pokemon has extra fees that comes with it too.
I didn’t buy it because fuck Nintendo. They treat their customers with such disrespect and disdain, a company that’s only bring held together by nostalgia alone. They’ve gotten into a cycle of seeing just how much money they can get while putting in no effort.
The people that think this are getting screwed by their jobs but they don’t want to think about their wage stagnating while their boss buys extra boats and houses.
It’s not any more expensive than any other electronics.
It’s a brand new tablet with okay battery life, pretty good performance and some low quality Bluetooth controllers included. Nothing else on the market is comparable. It’s basically a portable PS4 for $500 which is nice.
I recently built a PC. I bought RAM for $190. A week later it was $300. Now it’s over $400. Somehow, a Switch 2 is crazy overpriced at $500. People upset at the Switch 2 price are mouth breathers.
its actually more expensive if you include all the fees with online play, subscription that is required, even moreso with things like pokemon, also DLCs.
Isn’t everything more expensive if you include the costs of buying more stuff needed to enjoy it? PC, Console, Car, House, Burger, etcetera.
Online play on the Switch is $20 a year. The fact that they charge for online play and save backups is bullshit but not anywhere as bad as people pretend.
Isn’t Pokémon like a regular game you only need to buy once?
$80 for Mario Kart? At that price, we’ve got Mario Kart at home.
In all seriousness, the Nintendo Wii was REVOLUTIONARY when it came out. It was gangbusters when it released. It was $249, which is about $400 in today’s money, but for a completely original and amazing new system. The Wii U wasn’t exactly as revolutionary. It was a controller with a screen that you couldn’t take with you. It was a flop.
The Switch was a modern equivalent of the Wii. It was new. It was different. It was a mobile gaming console.
The Switch 2 IS THE SWITCH. There is nothing new about it to the everyday consumer mom and dad. There are no cool new features. No cool new games. It doesn’t justify itself or the cost to the sticky fingered kid next door who is content with Minecraft on the original Switch. Nintendo did what an American company led by shareholders would do and continued to do more of the same and will likely blame the consumer.
Mario-Kart-at-home by the way: supertuxkart.net
Buy now for $0 and get Rocket-League-at-home for free on top!
(It’s one of the game modes in SuperTuxKart. 🙃)
But yeah, $80 is kind of wild, even just because it’s fundamentally still a cart game. You pretty much need a group to regularly play it with, otherwise you won’t get your money’s worth out of that.
I actually reinstalled it myself after writing that comment. 😅
I only really started to fully appreciate it, when I learned that drifting gives you a boost. So, if you’re going around curves, you pretty much always want to drift, which then kicks your speed up once you stop drifting. Maintaining a higher speed than your car normally goes, is vital for beating the harder difficulties.
Well I saw Pokemon Legends ZA for 48% off recently. Not that it‘s worth that much or that I would ever buy a Switch 2. I actually stumbled upon that sale randomly. But the fact it‘s on sale already speaks volumes. Nintendo is likely in panic mode.
i wonder if it has do with pokemon being slop for the past generation and this one too. the lack of quality of the pokemon games doesnt justify its high cost. also because game freak said this the future of all pokemon games.
and I guess no. 10 was a copy of Coral Island I was gifted, oops lol
At some point I still want LAN Party Adventures, and The Lonesome Guild but those will wait until the next sale. In the meantime I have plenty to sink my teeth (thumbs?) into!
It might be, but if you care about the newest games, you either stick with the Switch 2, wait for a SD 2 or look elsewhere… The SD is getting closer to the Switch 1 state where modern games start to look more blurry, and if you want a hybrid device… Well, it is gonna show more.
Also for some stupid reasons SD availability sucks in several countries, like Mexico.
Most of “the newest games” are well within the spec of the Steam Deck. Of the 4 non-exclusive games nominated for GOTY at the Keighleys, they’ll all run on it just fine. Some of the biggest games of the year end up being the likes of Peak, Schedule I, or Megabonk, and not only are those games only available on PC (at least for a while), but they’re not even pushing the spec of the Steam Deck to its limit. With RAM pricing issues going on right now, high end studios are likely going to target a lower spec. And the companies that can afford to make a game that hits that higher spec are few and far between anyway, compared to the AA and indie studios that made most of the best games of the past few years.
From what I’ve heard, Expedition 33 runs like hot garbage. Even if you use something like Lossless Frames to use AI generated frames to fill in gaps and run at super low settings.
I played it all on desktop, but it looks like it got an update a month ago and is now Deck verified. Friends of mine played it on Deck before that and didn’t mention any complaints, but I wasn’t fishing for them either.
With RAM pricing issues going on right now, high end studios are likely going to target a lower spec.
That is quite a positive thought that I would truly want to become real, let’s just wait and see I guess, that doesn’t change the fact that SD 2 is imminent though (I know that is obvious).
What about hybrid gaming? I don’t think anyone can agree that SD is better than the Switch 2 or any other handheld device in 2025 regarding that… Perhaps only in certain cases as locked awful framerate (for the Switch 2).
All of new gaming hardware is decidedly less imminent now that this pricing nonsense is going on. Even if the tech exists, no one thinks they can sell at what they’d have to charge for it. It’s going to be a rough near term future for gaming hardware before it eventually levels out. Reports are that consoles planned for 2027 are now looking like they’ll be pushed back.
I’m not super used to calling that “hybrid gaming”, but my wife seems to have no problem playing cozy games on the Steam Deck, almost exclusively on the TV when I didn’t take it with me on the go. And we’re once again back to the best games and the best graphics not being all that correlated. The other part is that even if a random gamer has a Steam Deck, it’s unlikely to be their only gaming PC, and if they want the power to produce that larger image at better frame rates at home, they’ll play on that other PC, and that game will run its best there. On Switch 2, that one device is your only option no matter what. That means that if you want to play one of those beefier titles from the Switch 1, they’re not going to run at better settings ever unless the developer explicitly upgrades them; even then, there’s often the Switch tax compared to buying the same game on PC.
I’m not trying to talk you down from a Switch 2 if that’s your preference, but if someone’s asking me for a recommendation for a gaming handheld, the Steam Deck is going to be what I tell them until I rule it out due to some other need. I definitely wouldn’t start with a Switch 2. The Deck just hits a compelling price with a good software experience and, perhaps most importantly, a library that dwarfs what Nintendo could ever hope to match by following the traditional console model.
There are several yuzu and ryujinx forks floating around. For yuzu there’s citron, and eden-emu; for ryujinx there’s ryubing. Game compatibility varies so I suggest trying them all and see if any works.
Idk I picked it up and personally I felt the complete opposite. Everyone says its so massive and huge, I expected this massive bulky handheld but sadly its the opposite. Its big yeah but not really controller sized, my hands are too big for it so I’ll just stick to the steam controller (until the new one releases)
My son got 2 Pokémon games and a dlc. Seems like there’s plenty of life left in the Switch 1 for now, so no need to update.
When we got the switch 1, it actually sat unused for most of the first year. After a while we started to really enjoy it though. Maybe we’ll get a switch 2 in a year.
and people who are pokemon fans, likely keep thier old consoles with the pokmeon games so they can play it again, and transfer older pokemon to the newer consoles too.
I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles.
The average consumer does not care about this. The biggest reasons for people to not buy a Switch 2 are 1) people don’t have money and 2) lack of major first-party games. I waited months until I found a MKW bundle for $450 at a black Friday sale.
Once we get the next 3D Mario or Zelda, you can bet they will sell a lot of consoles.
Since I’m one of the people who is on the fence about whether or not to pick up a Nintendo Switch 2 or to get myself an ROG Ally (I have $250 of gift cards for Target which don’t sell the Steam Deck) so that I can play steam games on a handheld. I heartily disagree.
And it’s Nintendo’s anti-consumer policies that is making me hesitate on the Switch 2.
It already comes with Linux installed, and an emulator can be setup with five button presses and thirty seconds of waiting.
The base system is setup as immutable, but /home isn’t, so aur isn’t available out of the box, but flatpacks are for example
SteamOS is an Arch Linux, basically, with some stuff pre-installed. The only big difference is that it’s installed in immutable mode, but even that is not a big deal
Not exactly, but overlap is significant. A bunch of people want Nintendo because they always did Nintendo and that’s all they know, a bunch of people know that switch is something that kids want and so they get one, sure. But a bunch of people want to play some games lying on a couch or riding a metro or sitting in a queue at a dentist, and those people will at least google what exists on the market. This is an overlapped audience, and for a lot of them steam deck will be the obviously better choice.
I got a Switch because of handheld gaming and then I stopped using my Switch because I got a Deck, and my library became playable on it without having to rebuy them. And I can get cheaper games, bundles, and giveaways than on Nintendo to play on my Deck or PC. And if ARM support for steam frame makes its way to Android then I’ll be able to play those same Steam games on my phone too.
I don't think that's had much of an impact when Nintendo sold more Switch 2s at launch than Valve has manufactured Steam Decks over its entire lifespan. The Steam Deck is still an enthusiast product for a niche crowd, and will likely never be in direct competition with the big three.
It’s a comparatively new product, but it’s not like it’s something unsuccessful. It’s attached to Steam, that everyone who ever had a computer knows about, and everyone has a couple of games there, it’s being talked about very positively everywhere, and they’re repeatedly gained positive reputation over pro-consumer practices they regularly employ, and they somehow evading being put on blast for the child gambling industry they operate.
They’re known among gamers, which is indeed niche crowd, but also a crowd that is important here. They don’t have the cultural grasp on humanity as Nintendo, or other two, but all of them shitting the bed constantly and publicly, while Valve is catching wins all over the place.
Well… while the price of the Switch 2 certainly causes sticker shock, when you adjust for inflation it’s only about as expensive as the SNES was at launch… and is in fact cheaper then the NES was at launch. However, in the PS3’s case when adjusted for inflation it was about 1.5 times as expensive as the SNES at launch (for the 20 gb version, the 60 gb was double).
This tired old argument completely ignores the fact that consumer purchasing power was much higher back then. Everything costs a higher portion of our paychecks now, especially housing, healthcare, and education.
I would think what you can get today from a competitor for the same price or less is much more would be much more relevant than anything that occurred 40 years ago
Isn’t the Switch 2 is cheaper in today’s money than the PS3 was without a decade of inflation?
Edit: PS3 was 600€, adjusted for inflation (by some random online calculator) that’s about 900 today. So yeah, the Switch 2 is about 60% as expensive as the PS3 was.
How relevant is inflation when cost of living has gotten so inflated that the idea of home ownership went the way of renting. So if anything in today’s money eating costs can hurt the wallet even more with how essentials are eating up more disposable income.
People bring up inflation as though salaries have kept up like NBA salaries have kept up due to their strong union. But, for every day people salaries have stagnated in relation to cost of property, rent, utilities, and food.
Inflation is the measure of how much buying power your money is worth. Wage stagnation is wages not keeping up with inflation. They are not the same thing.
Wage stagnation isn’t a result of inflation because inflation happens first. So yeah when working out the equivalent price of a product inflation needs to be taken into account but **so does how much money everybody has. **
If $1 in 2005 is worth $15 today, but I still only get $6 an hour then it isn’t correct to say that a product that cost $15 today is effectively the same as a product costing $1 in 2005 because it’s not taken into the fact that I don’t get more money.
nintendolife.com
Aktywne