News for Raven. The N64 games in NSO wiill have a CRT filter for a retro feel.

gamingeek said:

Rumor: Switch 2’s Manufacturing Cost Revealed To Be Dangerously Close To Its Retail Price

May 13, 2025

by Ryan Parreno

Nintendo’s choice to make more powerful hardware came with a literal cost.


There’s been a bit of speculation about the Switch 2’s price. It’s far higher than Nintendo consoles have been for around two decades, and a lot of consumers may be right to complain that they’re being priced out. But why did Nintendo go this route? We may have finally gained insight around this.


Shortly after the Switch 2 Direct, Toyo Securities’ Hideki Yasuda shared his belief that the Switch 2 is already a loss leader. Toyo’s estimate was that the console’s ‘bill of materials’ was around $ 400. Subsequently, Nintendo Prime shared a rumor from retailer Double Jump Games that the Switch 2 was only making $ 4 per unit. In other words, Double Jump Games’ retailer data indicated that Nintendo wasn’t making a profit on the console at all.


MST Financial analyst David Gibson spoke to Financial Times, who made a stunning claim. He stated that the Vietnam export data for the Switch 2 unit price is $ 338. This is the figure that Nintendo’s partners provide to Vietnam and other countries for the purpose of determining custom duties.


By necessity, the retail price of any product would have to be higher than the cost of manufacturing. And no, this is even before companies decide on a profit margin. The price has to factor in shipping costs, which include not only the cost of dealing with shipping and transport companies, but the different tariffs and duties in each state.


While Gibson’s claim is lower than Toyo Securities’ estimate, the gap isn’t that big. It’s clear that the Switch 2 takes significantly more to make, down to the costs of the console’s more powerful components. It seems incredibly unreasonable to expect that Nintendo would have sold the console at $ 400, as there’s a huge chance that that price would not have been enough to even just cover shipping and transportation costs.


Ultimately, this is a situation where Nintendo made a decision that they knew would not please everyone. In between keeping their prices low and making a more powerful console, they went with the latter. And there could have been an alternate Switch 2, that would have probably been called a Switch Pro, with less powerful hardware than what’s in the Switch 2 now. It would have been designed to stay below the $ 400 mark, and would likely have not been powerful enough to run games like Cyberpunk 2077.


But we’re in a new era of Nintendo, where it seems the most important visible factor isn’t president Shuntaro Furukawa, but their hardware partner, Nvidia. We’ll find out in time how much Nvidia can push their hardware to make Nintendo and their customers happy (and along the way, show something to Sony and Microsoft who went with AMD).

This is such a weird place to be cause game fan me loves the return of good graphics Nintendo. Growing up they were always cutting edge and these last decades have been pretty sad in that regard. But business side me doesnt see this making much sense. It's like they saw the steam deck, see cell phones and think, ehhh people pay for high end products. But those people buying that arent the same group that get switch. They have us hardcore that buy whatever, but the switch is made up of families with kids and when you go up in price and hit a psychological barrier they dont need to upgrade for their kids when they are probably playing more on a pad or phone anyway.

I hope its a huge success and Nintendo at least tries to make more premium products but I feel the opposite will happen.