Nintendo president comments on decision for raising Switch 2’s price

After the announcement that Nintendo is increasing Switch 2’s price worldwide, president Shuntaro Furukawa spoke about the decision further. An investor asked the company to provide more insight during a financial results briefing Q&A.

Nintendo has been hit in a lot of ways over the past year. The company has been forced to deal with tariffs, exploding prices for memory, higher oil prices. Even foreign exchange rates have been a factor. Ultimately, Nintendo “concluded that maintaining the original price would lead to a significant deterioration in the hardware’s profitability.”

You can find Furukawa’s full comments below (via machine translation).

“The recent adjustment to the hardware price was not driven by any single specific factor; rather, it was a decision made in response to various recent shifts in market conditions that we determined would impact the global business viability of our dedicated game console operations over the medium to long term.

Regarding the Nintendo Switch 2, our fundamental approach to the dedicated game console business remains unchanged: our primary objective is to drive hardware adoption, and subsequently, to sell software to that installed base. Had the rise in costs been merely a temporary phenomenon – one expected to subside within a relatively short timeframe – we might have opted for a different strategy: pursuing corporate efficiencies, such as streamlining production, in an effort to expand our installed base while keeping the hardware price unchanged.

However, given that recent shifts in market conditions – specifically the soaring costs of components (particularly memory), as well as trends in foreign exchange rates and oil prices – are projected to persist over the medium to long term, we concluded that maintaining the original price would lead to a significant deterioration in the hardware’s profitability. Consequently, this would have the potential to negatively impact our overall business operations over the medium to long term. To ensure the sustainable growth of our dedicated game console business, it is essential that we maintain a sound profit structure when viewing the business in its entirety. Therefore – though it was a difficult decision to make – we ultimately decided to pass a portion of these increased costs on to the retail price.

The reason the magnitude of the price adjustment varies by region is that the degree to which each region is affected by the various market shifts underlying this decision differs from one region to another.”

We have the full list of Nintendo Switch 2 price changes and dates going into effect here, with Japan actually seeing additional increases. Furukawa also apologized and promised to make up for the higher price with a “robust software lineup”.