I've got an alarm set for 8:45 tomorrow morning. Not for work, not for a flight. For a preorder page.
If you somehow missed it, Nintendo is opening Switch 2 preorders on April 24th, tomorrow, at 9am through Nintendo's own site, plus Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and GameStop all doing their own separate lines at the same time. Which means the actual strategy here isn't "have good reflexes," it's "have five browser tabs open and hope one of them doesn't 500 error." I remember doing this exact dance for the PS5 in 2020 and swearing I'd never bother again, and yet here I am, phone charging next to the bed like it's exam day.
The thing that's been sticking with me isn't the console itself, it's how we got to this specific Thursday morning. Nintendo announced the Switch 2 back on April 2nd, full price reveal, $449.99, launch date of June 5th, the whole show. Preorders were supposed to open a week later. Then on April 9th Nintendo quietly announced they were pulling the preorder date entirely, citing "changing market conditions," which is corporate-speak for the new round of tariffs that hit right around then. For about two weeks nobody actually knew if $449.99 was still the real number or if it was about to become $499 or worse. Nintendo eventually confirmed last week that yeah, the console price is staying put, but Mario Kart World, the pack-in-adjacent launch title, is $79.99. Eighty dollars for one game. I keep doing the math in my head like it's going to come out different if I check again.
I don't think $80 kills the format overnight or whatever the hot takes are saying, but it does feel like the first time a mainstream, non-collector's-edition first-party game just casually crossed that line without much apology attached. Games have been creeping toward it for a couple years (some Deluxe editions basically got there already) but this is a plain $80 cartridge, no bonus content bundled in to soften it. I'll probably still buy it. I'm not proud of that.
What actually annoys me more than the price is the process itself. We've built this whole ritual around scarcity that isn't even really about scarcity anymore, it's about who can build the fastest checkout script. I don't have a bot. I'm not going to get one. So tomorrow at 9am I'm going to be a 38 year old man mashing refresh on Target.com next to a mug of coffee, competing against people running Python scripts they found on a Discord server. Feels bad! Feels like the system was designed by someone who has never once had to actually use it.
(Small tangent, not really related: I still have my launch-day 2017 Switch, the original gray Joy-Con model, and the left stick has the drift everyone's had for years now. I never got it replaced because by the time it got bad enough to bother, I'd basically switched to playing docked on the TV anyway. Anyway. That thing owes me nothing at this point, eight years of use out of a $299 console is a pretty good deal by any measure, tariffs or no tariffs.)
There's a separate, dumber irony in all this that I can't quite let go of. Tesla reported earnings yesterday, and profit was down something like 70% year over year, and the big line out of the call was Musk saying he's going to start pulling back from his DOGE role in May to spend more time actually running the company. Two totally unrelated companies, both getting knocked around by the same tariff and trade policy mess in the same news cycle, in totally different ways. One's delaying a video game preorder page by two weeks, the other's an actual earnings hit measured in billions. Weird to watch both tickers scroll by in the same afternoon of headlines.
Anyway. Alarm's set. If you're also trying tomorrow, my only advice is don't bother with the Nintendo site directly, everyone's going to hit that one first and it'll probably fall over before 9:01. Try Best Buy's app instead. That's the whole tip, that's all I've got.