So I did not get a Switch 2 preorder. I want that on the record before I say anything else, because everything below is colored by mild, dumb, disproportionate bitterness about a video game console.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring gaming Twitter for the last month: Nintendo announced the Switch 2 back in April, pulled the pre-order date at the last minute because of the tariff situation, then quietly brought it back a couple weeks later at $449.99 (the Mario Kart World bundle runs $499.99, which, fine, I get it, but still). Retail pre-orders through the usual places turned into an actual disaster the day they opened, sites crashing, carts emptying between "add to cart" and "checkout," the whole ritual we've all done before for concert tickets or a GPU during the mining boom. I didn't even bother with that round. I've done that dance before and I know how it ends for me.
What I did do was sign up for the My Nintendo Store invite thing, the one where they email a random subset of account holders a window to actually place an order. That window landed for a bunch of people earlier this month, and every day since I've been checking my inbox like it owes me money. Nothing. My brother-in-law, who owns exactly one Nintendo product (a Wii he bought in 2009 and hasn't touched since 2013, I have seen it, it is still in the box it came in half the time), got an invite two days ago. I have owned every Nintendo console since the NES my dad had at his desk job. There is no justice in a loyalty lottery. That's kind of the point of a lottery I guess, but it doesn't feel great to say out loud.
The tariff angle is the part that actually interests me past my own petty preorder feelings. Nintendo held the US price at $449.99 after all that back-and-forth, which a lot of people (myself included, for about a week) assumed meant a price hike was coming. It didn't, at least not yet, and I think that's mostly because Nintendo makes so much of its money on software and accessories rather than the box itself. The console is close to a loss leader in a normal year. Eating a tariff hit on hardware while game prices creep up (Mario Kart World is $79.99, first mainline Nintendo game at that price point, and yes I noticed) is a pretty coherent strategy even if nobody at Nintendo is going to say it that plainly in a press release.
Release date is still June 5th as far as I know, so there's a real chance this whole invite system resolves itself before launch and I'm worrying over nothing. But there's something very 2025 about the whole apparatus: an allocation system for a game console decided partly by an algorithm nobody can see and partly by macro trade policy set in a different building entirely, and the actual experience of it, for me, is just refreshing Gmail on my phone during lunch like a crazy person.
I'll admit the last time I cared this much about hardware availability was probably the PS5 in 2020, and I ended up getting that one through a friend who worked retail and texted me at 6am on a Tuesday. Maybe that's just how this works now. You don't buy the thing, you know somebody who knows the thing is happening. I don't currently know anybody like that for this one, so I'm stuck in invite purgatory with the rest of the unconnected masses.
If an invite lands in the next few days I'll probably post about it, mostly so I have a record of the exact moment I stopped complaining. If it doesn't, well, June 5th isn't that far off, and there's a nonzero chance general availability just works itself out by then anyway. I've been wrong about console launches calming down before. I was wrong about the PS5 too, for what it's worth, that took months.
Anyway. Back to actual work now, I have a backlog of half-finished posts sitting in drafts that this Switch 2 nonsense has been distracting me from for two weeks straight.