Because the yen in very weak right now. Global customers would buy up the entire Japanese stock if Nintendo released the Switch at an affordable price in Japan and if the price in Japan was the same as in the west, players wouldnt afford it.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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that is understandable, but why does everyone else get charged more unfairly?
It’s their home market, with a strong regional developer base, and Nintendo systems tend to have a lot of Japanese-exclusive titles that will most likely offset the lower cost of a Japanese-only console in the long run.
For international markets, they need to contend with US tariffs, that have been a threatened for many months, and various other production costs impacting all consoles. They are spreading these costs across all regions to both avoid sticker shock in any individual region as well as to avoid scalping via arbitrage.
Yes, this was announced at the beginning of April.
It's always cheaper in Japan
You have to understand that including all these languages takes some precious bytes in the memory and it's also a complex thing to do. It's completely justified that they charge you way more for the multilanguage support!
even when the Wii, Wii U, and switch had multi language support around $300 or some consoles even less in the past? Why is it suddenly now trying to justify being more expensive on the Switch 2?
Apparently sarcasm wasn't evident enough in my comment.
The Wii released in 2006 for $250USD. Inflation adjusted this is $397 today.
Wii U: 2013, $300= $412 today.
Switch: 2017, $300= $391 today.
The price of the switch 2 is consistent with past pricing. I haven’t paid much attention to the switch 2 and don’t know whether $400 is a good value. Just pointing out that the pricing hasn’t really changed.
Most people keep forgetting the cost of inflation when they complain about the price of the Switch 2. Not that it really matters because it's already predicted to sell well during its initial release at least.