Nintendo Might Have To Raise The Price Of The Switch 2 At The Worst Time

Nintendo may be about to “follow in Sony and Microsoft’s footsteps” and announce a Switch 2 price hike, according to a report from video game consumer insights firm Niko Partners. Although the new system is currently outselling the original Nintendo Switch by a wide margin in its first year, spiking RAM costs and ongoing tariffs could change all that. 

Niko Partners notes in a recent report (via VGC) that Nintendo opted “to maintain [the Nintendo Switch 2’s] $449 entry price” when the system launched in June 2025, even as a trade war between the U.S. and China fueled price hikes on its competition. It now expects Nintendo to have to match those increases in 2026 due to high import taxes, increased memory costs, and other market conditions. Even Amazon’s CEO is warning that this is the year companies start passing on more of the pain of tariffs to consumers. 

Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa previously told investors last November that the company could keep the Switch 2 at $450 and “maintain the current level of profitability for hardware for the time being unless there are significant changes in external factors.” That time may have now passed. Earlier this year, he said the company was monitoring the current RAM situation and didn’t commit to not raising the price in the near future. 

These rumblings continue to suggest that anyone thinking of buying a Switch 2 in the next year might be better off doing it sooner rather than later, though Niko Partners notes that Nintendo might just start exclusively selling the $500 Switch 2 bundle rather than raising the price of the standalone SKU. In the meantime, the second half of the device’s launch year has been decidedly more uneven than the first. 

Despite having the fastest sales of any Nintendo console ever, and currently outselling the original Nintendo Switch in Japan by almost 2:1 in its first 30 weeks on the market, Nintendo’s stock has been tanking. The company’s Switch 2’s Christmas hardware sales were reportedly down by 35 percent compared to hardware sales in 2017 (the Nintendo Switch’s release year). Hardware sales numbers might be strong overall, but Bloomberg reported that game sales and attach rates were actually down compared to the first Switch’s debut. 

Meanwhile, Nintendo’s stock price has dipped by a whopping 23.45 percent over the last three months. With pressure mounting from the AI-driven RAM shortages and a weird holiday season for the Switch 2, Nintendo is in the awkward position of needing to maintain the existing launch-window sales momentum while also being expected to increase the hardware’s price tag. The only thing that could square that circle is a new 3D Mario or Zelda adventure, but neither of those have been officially announced yet.