2w ago

Nintendo president responds to Switch 2 price increase fears amid Trump tariff fallout

www.tweaktown.com

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TL;DR: Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser discussed with Wired the impact of new tariffs on the Nintendo Switch 2, which may increase its price from $449 to $600. The tariffs affect manufacturing in Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Nintendo is assessing the situation, having already moved some production out of China.

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So something that I wonder about with the MSRP is how much of that is a Nvidia tax that inflated the price? The Nvidia GPU market has been so absolutely screwed by Nvidia's lack of competition pricing model.
- nVidia genuinely does not care about gaming. It is just a way to have a few extra bins to increase effective yields for their datacenter/AI chips. If Nintendo wants to buy in bulk they'll sell in bulk. And if Nintendo doesn't like nVidia's prices they can talk to AMD... like the other consoles did. Jensen will just sell those chips as mobile devices or cars or whatever.
  Most speculation was around 400 USD for the switch itself for the given specs, tooling, etc. The Steam Deck is a different process but their LCD model is pretty indicative. 450 was a bump that would account for economic uncertainty and give them room to drop back down for regular discounts and the like.
  Then trump trumped the bed and the previously expected buffer zone just isn't enough. Which is why we are seeing the massive price hike.
  
  Backwards compatibility means they might not be able to talk to AMD unfortunately, depending on how the software is set up I'd assume.
  
  I and many people with a Cool PS2 can attest that AMD hardware has no problems running Switch games.
  
  Never heard of that, I assume it's an emulator. Emulation is different from running a game natively. Yeah, Nintendo probably could get AMD hardware to work as a replacement for Nvidia hardware, but I would guess either compatibility would be imperfect, there would be a performance hit, or both.
  
  Switch 2 emulates Switch 1 games, so being Nvidia or AMD doesn't really matter there
- Business to business is different than the consumer market. Nintendo comes to Nvidia and orders a custom product with a minimum order of 10 million chips, Nvidia wants that deal. They aren't going to arbitrarily increase the price because they can because Nintendo can and will move to another vendor. Nvidia wouldn't risk fucking up a long-standing relationship like that, especially since Nintendo is a repeat customer, and they can rely on repeat business from them each year. These are long standing relationships that don't just fall apart that quickly unless one party wants to drastically change what they are doing.

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