FISCHER: Start collecting your coins

Due to price increases, Mario will now need 146 coins to gain a 1-up

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

At long last, Nintendo has finally revealed its new next-generation video game console.

The Switch 2. Not the most creative naming convention. Definitely not as iconic as the “Super Switch” might have been, but perhaps less confusing than something like the “Switch-U.” At the very least, the name gets points for clarity.

It’s the Switch, but more. Bigger screen, bigger resolution, allegedly bigger framerates.

And a bigger price, coming in at an anticipated, but still reasonable, $450.

Maybe.

The announcement of the Switch 2 happened just days before the announcement of a sweeping series of tariffs from the president, including a 46% tariff to Vietnam, where Nintendo had moved its manufacturing after the previous trade war with China.

As a result, Nintendo has delayed pre-orders for the Switch 2 as it ponders the “evolving market conditions.”

Naturally, this obviously means that these tariffs have prompted Nintendo to move its manufacturing to the good ol’ U.S. of A, where Switch 2’s can be built and sold by Americans and for Americans.

I’m kidding, of course. It’s really just a question of whether or not Nintendo will take the financial hit of selling Switch 2s while tariffs cut into the margins or the publicity hit of raising the price of the console immediately after announcing it.

Either way, things are getting expensive around here.

Not just for the price of games either.

Nintendo’s first-party titles on the Switch 2 will reportedly cost either $70 or $80, jumping up from the $60 price point that was once a near iron-clad standard.

For decades, the standard retail price of video games has defied normal economic logic.

Video game development has gone from 12 guys sharing a computer cranking out a new title every six months to big budget endeavors that employ hundreds of people across several years, but the prices stayed the same.

We’ve gone from simple sprite animations and rudimentary 3D models to motion-captured actors and physics engines, but the prices stayed the same.

We’ve gone from music made out of whatever beeps and boops the console could manage to full orchestrated soundtracks, but the prices stayed the same.

It seems like for every aspect of game development that should cause the price to go up, the universe realigns itself with a way to bring it back down. Video games started climbing in to the $80 range once before back in the 90s, but the industry replacing traditional cartridges with CDs, which are far cheaper to produce, dropped it back down again.

Digital distribution has had an even bigger impact, with digital sales all but negating the expense of manufacturing a game and shipping it around the world to sit on retail shelves.

And, while perhaps less appreciated by consumers, the internet age has allowed publishers to develop or withhold content from their games to be sold separately, creating a revenue stream that has certainly contributed to the stability of the base price for the last couple of decades.

But nothing lasts forever, I guess. When the next Mario game comes out, it will probably be $10 to $20 more than when Mario 64 came out in 1996.

That really doesn’t seem that bad, and yet $80 still feels like a lot.

It just does.

On the upside, I’m in no hurry.

There are already more games in my backlog than I will ever be able to play and for every $80 AAA title that launches there are a dozen $20 games from smaller studios that also look neat.

Will I feel obligated to buy a Switch 2 when the next major Zelda title comes out? Yeah, probably. But that game hasn’t been announced yet and, with the way development times have been going on that franchise, we’ll all hopefully be out of this economic mess by then, anyway.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and really should vow to get through his unplayed Switch games before even considering a Switch 2.