The US site lists May 8. Preorders also seem to be invite-only in the beginning?
From the US site:
Invitation emails will be prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis to registrants who have purchased a Nintendo Switch Online membership with a minimum of 12 months of paid membership and a minimum of 50 total gameplay hours, as of April 2, 2025. Once invitation emails have been sent to all registrants meeting the priority criteria, invitations will be sent to remaining eligible registrants on a first-come, first-served basis.
The German site lists April 8, but requires you two have a Nintendo online subscription for the last two years.
I mean, go nuts. It will have cheaper games, a lot of the same cross-platform stuff and it trades blows on performance and display, from what I can see… but price isn’t really the biggest difference here.
The price reductions on the nintendo eshop aren’t really that enticing in comparison. So you have to pay pretty high prices for games or have to search on the second hand market to buy games cheaper.
On Steam, Gog and Epic you get good deals every day. Those crazy 1000+ game collections from Steam users aren’t there without reason. Games are often so cheap on Steam that you buy them even when you have 10 other games in the backlog you would rather play before.
Yeah, well, that’s not really a good thing in my book. You also arguably don’t need a thousand games you’re not gonna play. One of the things I’d like to see this gen on the Switch 2 is more curated discoverability and less shovelware.
I think your argument will make more or less sense depending on how the physical market eveolves. The price bump for physical is a bummer, but this generation it’s been very easy to find cheap physical copies, both new and used.
At the end of the day, PC handhelds are like PCs, you tend to pay more for the hardware (only the very cheapest LCD version of the Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2, and multiple specs are actually worse) and on consoles you get more affordable hardware but typically more expensive games, at least day one.
So at worst the Switch 2 is… you know, a console. The pricing of the hardware is by far the least egregious pricing choice in this whole thing. If anything, the Switch 2 feels weirdly standard for Nintendo’s typical strategy. They have a tendency to sell very old hardware at some profit instead of subsidizing it. This feels weirdly comparable to the PC handheld segment.
The Steam Deck is significantly cheaper when you take 🏴☠️ into account. Having cheaper hardware made having to deal with Nintendo’s walled garden worth it in the past. Plus the fact that there wasn’t anything else like the Switch when it launched.
Sure, anything is cheap if you don’t pay for software. Kinda not how we measure the value of the hardware.
I mean, by that metric, and considering how Nintendo’s software security has been, historically, the Switch 2 is probably going to get dirt cheap real soon, by your standards.
How open a platform is is high on the list of how I measure the value of hardware, but not how the general population does. I played my launch Switch way, way more after I jailbroke it. I was originally going to wait until the Switch 2 came out, but Nintendo pissed me off with their Yuzu crap last year. For most people that just wanna play games with less hassle, the Switch 2 compares much more favorably.
It’s not similar to PC hardware; It uses a Tegra processor like the Switch 1. Which means it’s more like a phone with a less than laptop grade Nvidia graphics chipset thrown in. Unlike the Steam Deck, for instance, which uses an AMD Z processor, a scaled down version of what is in the Xbox and PS5.
That is entirely meaningless. That’s not how performance works, it has no bearing on anything.
In practice, they showed a whole bunch of footage of comparable games, including Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. Hitman, Star Wars Outcasts and Split Fiction. At a glance, it seems fairly comparable to the current batch of PC handheld APUs and seems to be mostly running cross-gen PC games at lower resolutions and framerates but pretty solidly otherwise.
That puts it in a weaker spot than next-gen PC handhelds, but on par with most of the current batch. Or at least as on par as the Steam Deck is.
So in terms of pricing for the hardware it seems pretty consistent with what we’re seeing elsewhere. The two Deck models seem to have the most comparable specs, and those are slightly cheaper for the LCD and slightly more expensive for the OLED. Other handhelds are marginally more powerful but also way more expensive. With the upcoing batch of high-end AMD APUs being also way more expensive than last gen, it seems the Switch 2 is price-competitive, at least until Valve decides it’s time and tries to make another custom deal with AMD for a more powerful APU at scale.
I understand what you were saying. I’m saying it doesn’t make a fundamental difference what architecture is being used and there are other aspects that impact performance, so you can’t make assumptions based on that. Plus the GPU is very PC-like, or at least it was on the first Switch. Porting to these things is actually surprisingly straightforward.
There’s a price on the UK official store: £395.99 for the system. £429.99 including digital copy of MKW.
Preorders open on 8th April.
Edit: Physical copy of Mario Kart on its own is £74.99. Woof.
The US site lists May 8. Preorders also seem to be invite-only in the beginning?
From the US site:
The German site lists April 8, but requires you two have a Nintendo online subscription for the last two years.
Nothing yet on the US store. Tariffs threw a wrench in their plans, I reckon.
Edit: $449 apparently.
$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.
I just saw this getting reported. Oof. That’s not a great price.
The original rumor was true. Way, way too high for me to even consider it, will be getting a Steam Deck.
The Steam Deck is… not significantly cheaper?
I mean, go nuts. It will have cheaper games, a lot of the same cross-platform stuff and it trades blows on performance and display, from what I can see… but price isn’t really the biggest difference here.
The price reductions on the nintendo eshop aren’t really that enticing in comparison. So you have to pay pretty high prices for games or have to search on the second hand market to buy games cheaper.
On Steam, Gog and Epic you get good deals every day. Those crazy 1000+ game collections from Steam users aren’t there without reason. Games are often so cheap on Steam that you buy them even when you have 10 other games in the backlog you would rather play before.
Yeah, well, that’s not really a good thing in my book. You also arguably don’t need a thousand games you’re not gonna play. One of the things I’d like to see this gen on the Switch 2 is more curated discoverability and less shovelware.
I think your argument will make more or less sense depending on how the physical market eveolves. The price bump for physical is a bummer, but this generation it’s been very easy to find cheap physical copies, both new and used.
At the end of the day, PC handhelds are like PCs, you tend to pay more for the hardware (only the very cheapest LCD version of the Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2, and multiple specs are actually worse) and on consoles you get more affordable hardware but typically more expensive games, at least day one.
So at worst the Switch 2 is… you know, a console. The pricing of the hardware is by far the least egregious pricing choice in this whole thing. If anything, the Switch 2 feels weirdly standard for Nintendo’s typical strategy. They have a tendency to sell very old hardware at some profit instead of subsidizing it. This feels weirdly comparable to the PC handheld segment.
The Steam Deck is significantly cheaper when you take 🏴☠️ into account. Having cheaper hardware made having to deal with Nintendo’s walled garden worth it in the past. Plus the fact that there wasn’t anything else like the Switch when it launched.
Sure, anything is cheap if you don’t pay for software. Kinda not how we measure the value of the hardware.
I mean, by that metric, and considering how Nintendo’s software security has been, historically, the Switch 2 is probably going to get dirt cheap real soon, by your standards.
How open a platform is is high on the list of how I measure the value of hardware, but not how the general population does. I played my launch Switch way, way more after I jailbroke it. I was originally going to wait until the Switch 2 came out, but Nintendo pissed me off with their Yuzu crap last year. For most people that just wanna play games with less hassle, the Switch 2 compares much more favorably.
It’s both not unexpected and actually pretty reasonable, considering how similar hardware on PC handhelds stacks up.
I’m more upset at the nickel-and-diming of resolution and performance upgrades for Switch 1 games, to be honest.
It’s not similar to PC hardware; It uses a Tegra processor like the Switch 1. Which means it’s more like a phone with a less than laptop grade Nvidia graphics chipset thrown in. Unlike the Steam Deck, for instance, which uses an AMD Z processor, a scaled down version of what is in the Xbox and PS5.
That is entirely meaningless. That’s not how performance works, it has no bearing on anything.
In practice, they showed a whole bunch of footage of comparable games, including Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. Hitman, Star Wars Outcasts and Split Fiction. At a glance, it seems fairly comparable to the current batch of PC handheld APUs and seems to be mostly running cross-gen PC games at lower resolutions and framerates but pretty solidly otherwise.
That puts it in a weaker spot than next-gen PC handhelds, but on par with most of the current batch. Or at least as on par as the Steam Deck is.
So in terms of pricing for the hardware it seems pretty consistent with what we’re seeing elsewhere. The two Deck models seem to have the most comparable specs, and those are slightly cheaper for the LCD and slightly more expensive for the OLED. Other handhelds are marginally more powerful but also way more expensive. With the upcoing batch of high-end AMD APUs being also way more expensive than last gen, it seems the Switch 2 is price-competitive, at least until Valve decides it’s time and tries to make another custom deal with AMD for a more powerful APU at scale.
Huh? I’m not sure you understand what I was saying so I am just going to leave these links here:
CISC
RISC
I understand what you were saying. I’m saying it doesn’t make a fundamental difference what architecture is being used and there are other aspects that impact performance, so you can’t make assumptions based on that. Plus the GPU is very PC-like, or at least it was on the first Switch. Porting to these things is actually surprisingly straightforward.