Club Nintendo

[shikamaru317]

KLXVER said:

shikamaru317 said:

Figured I'd post this here since it's not really worthy of a whole thread until more sources corroborate the info:

A leaker over on Discord (who apparently has a pretty good track record) put out a new leak about Nintendo's next console. Say the internal codename for is NG, final name isn't known yet. Says Nintendo is planning for a September 2024 release, but has a placeholder in November 2024 as well (presumably in case they need to delay). Says the system has 2 SKU's planned, standard for $450, digital only for $400.

That sounds awful. Hopefully none of it is true.

I agree that it doesn't sound great, but honestly, it sounds plausible to me. Breaking the leak down into 3 parts:

Release date- September release sounds plausible, Nintendo's own forecasts for this fiscal year (which ends in March) suggest no Switch 2 on this fiscal year, so release would be in April 2024 at the soonest. 

Price-The specs that have formerly leaked out would seem to put Switch 2's specs somewhere around Steam Deck, and Steam Deck is $400 for the basic model, $530 if you want an SSD, so the pricing of $400-450 sounds about right to me for those leaked specs. While it would be nice for we consumers if Nintendo would sell the hardware at a loss, like they once would have, Nintendo just doesn't do that anymore. Switch 1 staying at $300 all gen is evidence of that, Nintendo wants to profit on hardware sales too, not lose money on hardware like the old days.

2 SKU's physical and digital- Again this seems plausible to me. The details that leaked out from Nintendo's behind closed doors Gamescom demo said that the Switch 2 games they showed had very fast load times. That suggests Switch 2 has an internal SSD with pretty fast speeds. If Switch 2's internal storage is that fast, that presents Nintendo with a pretty big problem for physical cartridges, cartridges that match the speed of the internal SSD are going to be pretty pricey. So Nintendo will be wanting to push as many gamers as possible toward digital since they'll probably be spending like $8-10 per cartridge or something like that, cutting into their profit margin. Digital profit margin is already much higher than physical even with cheap to print discs on consoles like Xbox and Playstation, but the profit margin gap between physical and digital is going to be even larger when high-speed carts are being used for physical games. Offering a cheaper digital SKU is a good way to push more gamers toward digital gaming and help cut down on those physical profit losses.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 06 October 2023