So Thursday morning I set an alarm for 7:45am to buy a video game console, which is not a sentence I ever pictured typing on this blog in 2011, but here we are in 2025 and this is apparently just what Nintendo preorders look like now.
Backstory for anyone who missed the Direct: Switch 2 is $449.99 on its own, or $499.99 if you want it bundled with Mario Kart World, and it launches June 5th. Nintendo was originally going to open US preorders on April 9th, then pulled the plug at the last minute "to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," which is corporate-speak for we have no idea what this thing is going to cost us to make right now, please hold. That delay dragged on for two weeks with basically zero updates, and then out of nowhere preorders went live last Thursday, April 24th, at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, GameStop and Nintendo's own store, mostly all around 9am Eastern, mostly all at once.
I want to be clear I am not a line-camper by nature. I didn't preorder a PS5 in 2020, I still don't have a Steam Deck, I'm generally the guy who buys things six months late once the reviews are in and the price has dropped ten bucks. But my kid has been asking about Switch 2 since the Direct dropped, so I figured I'd try.
Best Buy put everyone into a virtual waiting room, which is a nice way of saying "here is a spinning wheel, please stare at it." I got in the queue around 8:50, watched the little progress bar do essentially nothing for close to forty minutes, and by the time it let me through the console-only option was gone and all that was left was the bundle, which honestly I didn't mind since Mario Kart World was going to be a day-one purchase anyway. Checked out at 9:47am. My brother-in-law, who tried GameStop, wasn't so lucky — their site just fell over entirely for a stretch, threw a bunch of 500 errors, and by the time it came back everything was gone. He's now looking at eBay listings for $700-900 for something that costs $450 at retail, which, no. Just no. I get that scalping is a whole economy at this point but watching it happen in real time, same day, same morning, still makes my blood pressure go up a little.
The tariff angle is the part that actually interests me more than the hardware. Nintendo never raised the sticker price after the delay, which surprised me a little given how much noise there'd been about import costs on electronics. Doesn't mean it's off the table for accessories or the eventual restock wave, but for launch day at least the $449.99 number held. Compare that to some of the chatter I've seen out of other hardware makers this spring about passing costs onto consumers, and it's a little bit of a relief, even if I assume there's some quiet margin-shrinking happening on Nintendo's end that we'll never hear about.
None of this is a review, obviously, I don't have the thing in my hands yet and won't until June. But I think the preorder scramble itself is worth writing down while it's fresh, because five years from now nobody's going to remember the specific chaos of refreshing five browser tabs on a Thursday morning, and it's exactly the kind of small dumb detail that's fun to look back on. I did the same thing for the Wii in 2006 standing outside a Circuit City that doesn't even exist anymore, so I guess this is just the version of that ritual we get now: no cold parking lot, just a spinning wheel and a 500 error and a credit card typed in a little too fast because you're afraid the button's going to disappear.
If you're still hunting for one, my only real advice is don't sleep past 8:30am on restock days, and don't bother with GameStop's site if their servers were already struggling the first time around. I'll believe it's fixed when I see it.