this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Nothing yet on the US store. Tariffs threw a wrench in their plans, I reckon.
Edit: $449 apparently.
$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.
I just saw this getting reported. Oof. That's not a great price.
The original rumor was true. Way, way too high for me to even consider it, will be getting a Steam Deck.
The Steam Deck is... not significantly cheaper?
I mean, go nuts. It will have cheaper games, a lot of the same cross-platform stuff and it trades blows on performance and display, from what I can see... but price isn't really the biggest difference here.
Maybe, but I already have a large game library and free online play, and can get new games for much cheaper.
The price reductions on the nintendo eshop aren't really that enticing in comparison. So you have to pay pretty high prices for games or have to search on the second hand market to buy games cheaper.
On Steam, Gog and Epic you get good deals every day. Those crazy 1000+ game collections from Steam users aren't there without reason. Games are often so cheap on Steam that you buy them even when you have 10 other games in the backlog you would rather play before.
Yeah, well, that's not really a good thing in my book. You also arguably don't need a thousand games you're not gonna play. One of the things I'd like to see this gen on the Switch 2 is more curated discoverability and less shovelware.
I think your argument will make more or less sense depending on how the physical market eveolves. The price bump for physical is a bummer, but this generation it's been very easy to find cheap physical copies, both new and used.
At the end of the day, PC handhelds are like PCs, you tend to pay more for the hardware (only the very cheapest LCD version of the Deck is cheaper than the Switch 2, and multiple specs are actually worse) and on consoles you get more affordable hardware but typically more expensive games, at least day one.
So at worst the Switch 2 is... you know, a console. The pricing of the hardware is by far the least egregious pricing choice in this whole thing. If anything, the Switch 2 feels weirdly standard for Nintendo's typical strategy. They have a tendency to sell very old hardware at some profit instead of subsidizing it. This feels weirdly comparable to the PC handheld segment.
The Steam Deck is significantly cheaper when you take 🏴☠️ into account. Having cheaper hardware made having to deal with Nintendo's walled garden worth it in the past. Plus the fact that there wasn't anything else like the Switch when it launched.
Sure, anything is cheap if you don't pay for software. Kinda not how we measure the value of the hardware.
I mean, by that metric, and considering how Nintendo's software security has been, historically, the Switch 2 is probably going to get dirt cheap real soon, by your standards.
How open a platform is is high on the list of how I measure the value of hardware, but not how the general population does. I played my launch Switch way, way more after I jailbroke it. I was originally going to wait until the Switch 2 came out, but Nintendo pissed me off with their Yuzu crap last year. For most people that just wanna play games with less hassle, the Switch 2 compares much more favorably.
Yeah, sure, that's always the case for consoles. I have no objection to that train of thought. If you want versatility and an open platform you're going to be better off with a similarly specced PC handheld. At the cost of first party exclusives and a few other creature comforts, but if you're only going to buy one device and that's a priority that's clearly the way to go.
Looking at it in general and in the market and just looking at the hardware they're packing in, though, their proposition isn't super overpriced. The part that is a bummer is they seem to be shifting that extra cost to other places with the subscription, generational upgrade packs, higher physical game prices and so on.
It is quite a shift from how Nintendo's been doing things since the Wii. They were always the weaker hardware at a lower price guys, so this is quite a change in their philosophy. I saw you said as much in another comment. They'll be competing more directly with Sony and Microsoft than they have since the Gamecube. I'll be interested to see how selling at top dollar does for them in the particularly unstable global market we have now.
Yep. This is a shockingly... Playstationy proposition. First party games aside I would have not been surprised to see a Vita revival be this exact console. I mean, they're basically shipping Bloodborne 2 and EyeToy.
Nintendo's pricing themselves with the big boys again, let's see how they do!
It's both not unexpected and actually pretty reasonable, considering how similar hardware on PC handhelds stacks up.
I'm more upset at the nickel-and-diming of resolution and performance upgrades for Switch 1 games, to be honest.
It’s not similar to PC hardware; It uses a Tegra processor like the Switch 1. Which means it’s more like a phone with a less than laptop grade Nvidia graphics chipset thrown in. Unlike the Steam Deck, for instance, which uses an AMD Z processor, a scaled down version of what is in the Xbox and PS5.
That is entirely meaningless. That's not how performance works, it has no bearing on anything.
In practice, they showed a whole bunch of footage of comparable games, including Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. Hitman, Star Wars Outcasts and Split Fiction. At a glance, it seems fairly comparable to the current batch of PC handheld APUs and seems to be mostly running cross-gen PC games at lower resolutions and framerates but pretty solidly otherwise.
That puts it in a weaker spot than next-gen PC handhelds, but on par with most of the current batch. Or at least as on par as the Steam Deck is.
So in terms of pricing for the hardware it seems pretty consistent with what we're seeing elsewhere. The two Deck models seem to have the most comparable specs, and those are slightly cheaper for the LCD and slightly more expensive for the OLED. Other handhelds are marginally more powerful but also way more expensive. With the upcoing batch of high-end AMD APUs being also way more expensive than last gen, it seems the Switch 2 is price-competitive, at least until Valve decides it's time and tries to make another custom deal with AMD for a more powerful APU at scale.
Huh? I’m not sure you understand what I was saying so I am just going to leave these links here:
CISC
RISC
I understand what you were saying. I'm saying it doesn't make a fundamental difference what architecture is being used and there are other aspects that impact performance, so you can't make assumptions based on that. Plus the GPU is very PC-like, or at least it was on the first Switch. Porting to these things is actually surprisingly straightforward.
That is literally what I have been trying to say this whole time in response to you saying it looks comparable. I genuinely have no idea what you are arguing against at this point.
I said "considering how similar hardware on PC handhelds stacks up", meaning the current batch of PC handhelds seem to get similar performance and visuals than what they showed today. You claimed that the hardware isn't similar because the CPU is an ARM device.
If you meant that to mean that the performance is the same despite the different architecture you have to walk me through how you thought I was going to interpret that from you caveating that the architecture is different with no additional context, but I guess I'll take it?
Your response was to Simple’s comment about price. From my reading it seemed that you were implying that the price was right because the performance was similar. I was agreeing with Simple and disagreeing with that perceived implication based on the fact that it uses a different and historically cheaper architecture. One that would typically make a dollar per hertz comparison useless, as you seem to have pointed out. Hence my confusion.
Yes, I am implying that the price is right because the performance is similar. ARM isn't fundamentally cheaper than x64, I don't know where you get that. The Switch was cheap because it was running a cheap, old, basically off-the-shelf part, not because that part had an ARM CPU. And indeed the Deck is running an older AMD APU as well at this point.
My laptop has an ARM CPU in it. I assure you it wasn't any cheaper than the equivalent x64 version with the same performance.
Then it seems we got off on the wrong foot when you called my disagreement meaningless.
RISC has always been fundamentally cheaper than x86 which is one reason why Nintendo has used a RISC processor in all of their handheld consoles since the original GameBoy.
Your last sentence is pretty much my point though. There is no reason for that. Look at the iPad and the Mac Mini, look at the Raspberry Pi… there is no reason for a RISC machine to cost more than an x86 machine.
This conversation is kinda surreal and I think I want it to stop.
Even if you were correct about this, and you are not, especially in modern times, this only applies to one part of the APU. The GPU is still your run of the mill CUDA-based Nvidia GPU, effectively a PC part. And this is a handheld, a lot of the cost is stuck in the display, controllers, storage and the rest of the hardware package. The CPU component of the APU is not going to be what sets the baseline for cost unless you're building in a super high-end part.
I can't parse how you're looking at this, but I assure you that it doesn't counter the point that this thing seems to both perform similarly and cost about as much as the current batch of PC handhelds. I don't know how this is a back-and-forth thing.
This conversation is surreal because you don't seem to understand how disagreement works. You said the price makes sense, I am saying it doesn’t. You are free to end the discussion there if you wish but I am going to keep responding to the person who keeps acting like their opinion is fact;
Tegra GPUs are specifically cost reduced, low power versions of previous generations of GeForce GPUs. The one in the Switch 2 has been rumored to be based on the 3000 series but I have not seen any confirmation of that as yet. I feel like you are making my point for me, you keep saying that everything else costs the same so why should this one cheaper part matter… and my response is because it’s cheaper. Note the lack of PCI and Thunderbolt for instance. There is also no Windows license to worry about.
If you don't want to reply then don't but seriously it seems like you are getting upset solely because somebody has a differing opinion.