Fight-the-Streets said:
Yes, it's still "cliff"-talk, amazing after all these very successful years of the Switch! Even if the price difference should be only $50 between Switch OLED and Switch 2, it would mean that the standard Switch will be $100 cheaper than Switch 2 and right there at Slownenberg you have your $100 price difference. It will even come with a game for free, so the actual difference will be $160 (plus 3 month of free Nintendo Online membership). Maybe, Nintendo will discontinue the standard model but still $50 price difference (without a bundled game) is still money for the people who buy late in consoles lifecycle. People buying late are cost sensitive, otherwise, they would have bought a Switch already a long time ago. So for them, $50 do matter. The cheap alternative, the Switch Lite, was never that popular because it doesn't give you the full Switch experience. When you know that you could play also on the TV with a Switch, you don't wanna miss it, even if you play in handheld mode most of the time. We also shouldn't forget that every year there are new kids that come into an age were they want to play with a Switch. These new kids will demand a Switch 2 but many price sensitive parents will say, no no, the old Switch will just do it for you. The kid will still be happy as there are tons of great games for this console to play. Also, thinking on places were Nintendo isn't present, like whole Latin America, there's saled potential for Switch 1. Currently, the Switch is still way too expensive in those places because someone has to import those consoles and these importers want to earn money of course. But once the Switch 2 is out, the Switch 1 will also be less expensive in those places and finally more people there can afford one. |
Only if they drop the price. So that's the whole deal. If Nintendo does price cuts Switch can keep selling some for years. But if Nintendo doesn't bother dropping the price Switch sales are gonna drop off as soon as next gen starts so Nintendo will very quickly move over production to focus almost entirely on Switch 2. Lite could still be picking up some sales without a price cut, but that's already the least popular model so it's also the weakest model for continuing sales.
Nintendo can either drop prices to like $150/$200/$250 once Switch 2 is out so they can keep selling the Switch to a different market segment than Switch 2, or they can just not bother dropping the price and cut off production and focus everything on moving people over to Switch 2 with backward compatibility. It's really up to them, whether their business strategy is to have two markets going at once, a cheap Switch alongside Switch 2, or focus on a single market trying to get everyone buying the new system by saying it plays Switch games plus the next generation of games for barely higher cost than a hybrid Switch.
