Today was supposed to be a good day. April 9th, 9am, US preorders open for the Switch 2, I click the button, I wait for the "your order is confirmed" email like it's 2017 again and I'm refreshing a Best Buy page at 2am for the original Switch. Instead Nintendo put out a statement this morning saying they're delaying US preorders "to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions on consumers and our business." Translation: nobody at Nintendo of America knows what this thing is going to cost them to import right now, so nobody's taking your money yet.
For anyone who hasn't been following, the console itself got its big reveal at the April 2nd Direct. $449.99, launching June 5th, the new Mario Kart World bundled or sold separately depending on which flavor of the internet you trust that day. I watched the whole Direct on my lunch break and texted a friend "this is basically what I expected" which, in hindsight, undersells how much I wanted one. I've bought every Nintendo console since the GameCube and I'm not about to stop now, tariffs or no tariffs.
And the tariffs are the actual story here, not the console. Most of this stuff, the Joy-Con 2s, the dock, probably a good chunk of the board itself, gets assembled in Vietnam and Cambodia, with components sourced from all over Asia. The tariff regime the administration rolled out last week (and then partially paused today, more on that in a second) put reciprocal tariffs on basically everyone Nintendo's supply chain touches. So a console Nintendo priced at $449.99 two weeks ago might cost them meaningfully more to actually land in a US warehouse by June. Rather than eat that cost silently or jack the price up on people who already clicked preorder, they just... didn't open preorders. Which is honestly a more honest move than I expected out of a company that's historically been cagey about this stuff.
The kicker is that the broader tariff situation flipped again literally hours after Nintendo's statement went out. The White House announced a 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs for most countries this afternoon, while simultaneously cranking the China-specific tariff rate way up. Markets did the kind of single-day swing you usually only see in a crash movie, except upward. So Nintendo made its call this morning under one set of rules and by dinner the rules had changed again. I don't envy whoever has to build the actual retail cost model for this thing right now. Imagine being the person at Nintendo of America whose job this week is a spreadsheet that changes its own assumptions every few hours.
Practically, none of this changes my plan. I'm still buying a Switch 2 the day I'm able to. I've got two kids who've worn the joysticks down to nubs on our launch-day 2017 Switch and a stack of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe saves that need a sequel. But I'll admit the delay put a weird little dent in the excitement. Preorder day is supposed to be a small ritual, you clear your calendar around it, you have the credit card out, and instead I got a corporate statement about "market conditions" and a vague "we'll share more soon." It's a minor thing in the scheme of a week where actual global trade policy is getting rewritten in real time, I know that. But it's also the first time a tariff headline has personally cost me a Saturday morning ritual I was looking forward to, and that's a weirder feeling than reading about it in the abstract.
One more small thing worth flagging: reporting today suggests some other regions, including Canada, are proceeding with their preorder dates as originally scheduled, which if true means this is very specifically a US pricing and import problem rather than Nintendo getting cold feet on the console itself. Worth watching whether that holds up over the next few days, because if the US is the only market getting the delay treatment, that tells you a lot about where Nintendo thinks the actual risk lives.
Anyway. No preorder today. I'll update whenever they set a new date, assuming the tariff picture holds still long enough for them to pick one.