Nintendo has decided to postpone the date at which US gamers can pre-order the Nintendo Switch 2, as the company tries to figure out the impact of the sweeping tariffs that the Trump administration has applies to goods imported from other countries. However, the pre-order date for other countries and regions is unchanged, and the console is still set for launch on 5th June 2025.
In a statement to Gamespot, Nintendo said:
“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.”
Nintendo originally announced that the console would cost $450 on its own or $500 with Mario Kart World bundled in, but with Nintendo being a Japanese company and their games consoles being assembled in China and Thailand using parts from South Korea, Taiwan and beyond, the cost of importing has just jumped up massively.
While Japan is subject to a 24% tariff rate, the rate for China to 34% and Thailand to 37% – per the BBC – and it’s the point of origin of manufacture in the latter two that would be most applicable here. With a roughly 33% jump, it could be a new $600 price point for the Switch in the US, before any state sales tax is applied.
Why these seemingly arbitrary numbers? While the Trump administrations claims to have used a sum of tariff rates and non-tariff barriers to figure out a cost to US company exports, posts online quickly deduced that they are actually just using the trade deficit to a country, divided it by the country’s exports to the US, and made it a percentage. For any countries with a trade surplus to the US, such as the UK which buys more US goods than it sells to the US, they applied a standard 10%.
This array of tariffs has had a huge impact on global markets over the last couple of days, and will inevitably start to affect prices on store shelves soon. It also came at exactly the wrong time for Nintendo, but that hasn’t stopped US retailers from starting to put up shop pages for the console in preparation for pre-orders to go live for consoles, accessories and games.
Source: Gamespot
