So, president of Nintendo America, Doug Bowser (an apt name, given Mario lore...), decided to chime in and defend Nintendo's pricing strategy. He confirmed that tariffs were not factored into the price, and that if people can't afford the switch 2, well, there is always the switch 1. As the article points out, the switch 1 never got a price drop, which, if we follow up to my last article on this, is ahistorical. As we have seen, these consoles would have a price at launch, and would very quickly get discounts, typically within 2 years. The nintendo switch, instead, got a cut down model for $200, which is the equivalent of a price drop, but it was a handheld only version of the console and as such, lacked features like the dock and being able to hook it up to a TV. neither of those models got price drops. And now, the switch 2 price is based on the fact that the switch 1 is still at its MSRP, and "well, we're not gonna sell it cheaper than the original switch, are we?"
...that's it guys. Just....let them cook. Don't buy their crap. Boycott the crap out of them. If this pricing logic is taken to its logical end, every generation is gonna be more expensive than the last, and old stuff never gets cheaper. They're pulling an nvidia. Remember how nuts the GPU market has gotten, where price/performance has come to a relative standstill for almost a decade now (to be fair its 2x what it was back in 2016-2017, but at the same time, 2x in a whole decade is terrible as that used to happen every 3 years).
Tech is supposed to get CHEAPER. New stuff comes out. It's expensive at first, but due to the rate of progress, it gets cheap quickly, and then new stuff comes out that's at roughly the original price, which is better than the old stuff. What is high end one year might be midrange the next. The year after that, it's low end. The year after that, it's obsolete. Sure, if you insist on being on the bleeding edge, you'll pay tons of money, but there used to be tons of options at various price options. This has been my argument for why the GPU market is screwed and now Nintendo is doing the same thing.
Again, MSRPs of stuff like the N64, Game cube, Wii, etc seem high accounting for inflation, typically around $350-400 these days. But again, you wait a year, you get price drops. You wait another year, you get more price drops. By the end of a console's life cycle, it's a fraction of the price. I know my friend gave me an old 2DS he had. He paid $80 for it. It cost $250 at launch. And that's just the last gen handheld before the switch. DS was $150, went down to $100. By the end of the wii's life cycle, it was $130, it launched at $250. The Game cube went down to $100 from $200 just 2 years after launch and by the end of its life cycle, it was going for $50. Like, this used to be the norm.
The nintendo switch is 8 years old, and it still costs MSRP: $300. it should be literally like $100-150 by now. Switch lites should be on fire sale for like $80 by this point. It's OLD. It's literally the end of its lifecycle, and it's still MSRP. And now nintendo is pushing the boundaries by seeing what it can get away with with the switch 2, charging more than ever. Again, even the wii u, accounting for inflation, is still like $410. And that didn't sell very well.
I'm gonna be honest, I never bought a switch 1. I'll tell you why: cost. It's not that I dont have an interest in nintendo's games. It's that I'm not willing to pay nintendo's prices for games. My best IRL friend is a huge nintendo fanboy. He's been trying to push me to get the switch since it came out. I never did. Again, because price. $300 for a console, $200 for the handheld version. Games that almost never go on sale and never get deep discounts. The business model sucks. Nintendo is trying to charge a premium for their stuff these days. They're trying to never lower prices in order to make it hold more value. But they fail to understand that the lower they charge price wise, the more people they bring in. ANd historically, their success is due to being the relatively cheap competitor.
Again, nintendo is seeing what they can get away with. They're F-ing around. let them find out. DO NOT BUY THIS. DO NOT BUY $450 switch 2s, DO NOT BUY $80 games. Laugh them out of the room. Because if you dont, their next console will cost $600, and they'll charge $100 for games. And they'll keep doing this until they cant get away with it.
Heck, this might end up being $600-700. Again, tariffs arent included in these prices. With tariffs, this console might literally be $600+. Trump is giving us a double whammy. And I'll be blunt, you should punish the republicans electorally too. They're screwing up the economy. I normally say presidents do not influence the economy much. BUT...Trump is screwing up so bad, he's literally pulling a Herbert Hoover. Treat the GOP as you would hoover. Throw them out on their butts and get the democrats back in. I may not think the dems are amazing, but Biden was way better than this.
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