Mark Walton
In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said the company has no plans “at this point” to increase the price of the Switch. Despite “rising production and shipping costs” for the system, Furukawa said Nintendo wants to “avoid pricing people out” of its console ecosystem (a worry apparently not shared by Meta, which recently raised the asking price of its Quest 2 VR headset).
While some are overreading the “at this point” phrasing as suggestive of a future Switch price increase, all this talk has us focused on some different questions. Namely, why haven’t we seen a price drop for the Nintendo Switch in the last five-plus years? And can we ever expect Nintendo to offer the system for less than its launch price?
A historical anomaly
When it comes to consistent console pricing, the Switch is truly in a class by itself. As of this writing, the Switch has been available in North America for over five years—nearly 2,000 days—yet it’s still being sold in the US for the same $299.99 you would have paid when the system launched in March, 2017.
To say this is unprecedented in the game industry is an understatement.
Looking back through the history of game console pricing, we found that the vast majority of consoles see their first price drop within a year or two of launch. It’s a pattern that encompasses successful systems like the PS2 (which dropped from $300 to $200 about 17 months after its US launch) to stinkers like the Wii U (which saw a $50 price drop just 10 months after launch), and almost everything in between.
The few consoles that do make it out of their second full year without a price drop almost invariably see some sort of reduction in year three. The Switch, on the other hand, has now shot through years three, four, and five at its original price.
After five years on the market, the average game console (that hasn’t stopped production entirely by that point) sells for an average price that’s about 50 to 60 percent of its nominal launch price (depending on whether you look at the mean or the median). The Switch, which is still at 100 percent of its nominal launch price over five years after launch, is a huge outlier.
The only previous console that’s really in the same price-stability ballpark as the Switch is the Nintendo Wii. That system finally dropped from $250 to $200 in November of 2009, just over 1,100 days after its late-2006 launch. The Switch, for its part, is now threatening to double that record.
