I've had the Nintendo Direct from last Wednesday open in a tab for five days now, half-watched twice, and I still can't get past the Mario Kart World price. Seventy-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. For one game. I know, I know, everyone's already said this, it's not exactly a hot take at this point, but living with the number for a week is different than seeing it flash by in a headline.
For anyone who missed it: Nintendo finally did the full reveal on the Switch 2 after months of teaser dribbling, and the console itself is $449.99. The Mario Kart World bundle runs $499.99, which if you do the subtraction means they're valuing the game itself at fifty bucks in the bundle context but charging eighty standalone. That gap alone tells you something about how they expect people to buy this thing. Nobody's supposed to buy it a la carte.
I bought my original Switch back in March 2017 for $299.99, on release weekend, from a Best Buy that had maybe six units and a line that started before the store opened. I remember the price felt steep then too, but $299 to $449 isn't just inflation catching up, it's a genuinely different tier of purchase. And this is before anyone's even mentioned what the tariff situation happening right now might do to the price further down the road (a separate mess I am deliberately not getting into today, there's enough ink being spilled on that elsewhere this week without me adding more).
The specs justify some of it, to be fair. 4K output when docked, the new Joy-Con 2 controllers that apparently work as a mouse if you flip them on their side, a GameChat feature for voice and video calls baked into the OS, 256GB of internal storage instead of the original's embarrassing 32GB. Backward compatibility with the existing Switch library is there too, which matters a lot to me personally because I have something like 40 games in my library at this point and was quietly dreading the idea of starting over.
Still. The part that actually got under my skin isn't the console price, it's the accessory and game pricing sitting on top of it. A Pro Controller for the new system is rumored (not officially priced yet as of this writing, so take that with salt) to land north of what the current one costs, and if first-party Nintendo games are setting a new $79.99 ceiling, that's a signal to every third-party publisher that the floor just moved. Once one big platform holder normalizes eighty dollars for a flagship title, that number stops looking insane by summer. It always goes that direction, never the other way.
I'll probably still buy one. That's the annoying part of writing all this out, I can feel myself talking myself into a purchase I was pretending to be lukewarm about. June 5th release date, apparently, so there's time to keep pretending. My actual plan, and I say this every generation and never follow through, is to wait for a price drop or a slimmer revision. Last time I said that I was in line at Best Buy eleven days after launch.
What I keep coming back to is how normal all of this has started to feel. A console launching at a price that would've caused genuine outrage a decade ago is just Tuesday now. Same thing happened with graphics cards, same thing's happening with phones. Everyone grumbles for a news cycle and then the line forms anyway. I'm not exempting myself from that, obviously, given the paragraph above. I just wish I could point to a single moment where the number stopped mattering to people, because I'd like to go back before it and take a different exit.
Anyway. If you're on the fence, the full games list from the Direct is worth a look before you decide anything, there were a couple of surprise ports in there I wasn't expecting. I'll probably write more once actual review units exist and the tariff situation shakes out one way or the other. For now I'm just sitting here doing math I didn't ask to do.