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archbrix on 17 January 2024
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Hiku said:
archbrix said:

I mean, DS was going for about 10 years; three years past the launch of the 3DS.  Were there other products using its parts?  And Nintendo stands to make far more money keeping Switch around than DS from online subs alone.

There's no way that Nintendo can't maneuver around a $50 price drop for all Switch models this year.  That would put Switch Lite in impulse buy territory, Switch classic at $249 and the Switch OLED still a full $100 cheaper than what Switch 2 will likely be.

Price drops aren't common anymore and they certainly won't help a system that nobody wants to begin with, but for a hit gaming system like the Switch, particularly when it has never had even one official price reduction, there is significant value there once it's cheaper.  By the time Switch 2 arrives, I believe a price drop for the original is inevitable.

I wouldn't know if those parts were being used by other products at the time. If they weren't, it would cost them more than otherwise.
And from what I can see at least, the DS only had one official price drop in 2005? Nintendo DS - Wikipedia
6 years before the launch of the 3DS.

It's normal for a system to keep being manufactured some years after its replacement is launched. PS4's are still being sold.
With the exception of consoles that sold poorly to begin with.

But them getting price drops is not something I'd expect when the cost to manufacture them isn't neccesarily getting lower, but potentially even higher, especially since we are still dealing with a semi-conductor shortage (even though it's not nearly as bad as it was a few years ago) and worldwide inflation.

I could have sworn that the DS Lite dropped to $99 at some point, after the DSi and XL models were out; found this article about it but not much else.  I know it went from its launch price of $149 down to $129 when the Lite came out in 2006 for sure.  It's true that the DS didn't sell much after 3DS, but we have to remember that the $80 3DS price drop a few months in made the cheaper price of the DS useless, as 3DS was backwards compatible.  So 3DS was able to appeal to the lower-end market itself.  With Switch 2 likely being $400, Nintendo needs to have a product to fill that market and it needs to be priced accordingly for that.

I have no idea how much it costs to keep the Tegra going at this point and I know inflation is a thing right now but that chip is 2015 old.  I could see, maybe, if Switch had already had a price reduction but I think Nintendo is waiting for the system's one and only price drop to happen once its successor arrives.