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Biggerboat1 on 11 April 2025
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Zippy6 said:

Biggerboat1 said:

I guess the proof would be in the pudding, but can you seriously see a souped up 'Switch 2 Home' costing a fraction of the base console not selling at least 20+ million units? What was that stat that was knocking around a while back about the number of Switch owners playing exclusively docked? Was it not around a third?

$450 will give a lot of people pause. $100 / $150 / $200 is much more in the 'why the hell not' territory.

Souped Up? If they're offering it cheaper it wouldn't be more powerful. I think a slightly cheaper Switch 2 Home would be a somewhat successful option. Even If it would only be around 10% of total Switch 2 sales.

The cost saving would just be removing the screen, battery & speakers and not having a separate dock. If they really wanted to save money they could also pack it with a cheaper controller instead of joycon 2's but I don't think they would want to have Switch 2 owners without Joycons for the few games that will not work with a pro controller.

But manufacturing wise I can't imagine the removal of screen, battery, speakers and separate dock would save them more than around $100. They'd still be charging $350+ for it.

By 'souped-up' I'm just referring to the chipset running at full clocks as they don't need to worry about battery/thermals. The hardware would be identical.

The Nvidia shield was similar to an OG switch without the screen/battery etc. and launched at 2/3s of the Switch's price (199.99 vs 299.99), however we have to assume that that was sold with a decent profit margin as Nvidia doesn't receive the recurring revenue that Nintendo enjoys from game purchases.

If the Shield was sold at cost then how low could it have gone? 1/2, 1/3?

Also, does the dock have more going on that we think? Isn't Nintendo selling it on it's own for $110? Either there's more tech in there than we think or Nintendo really are going full Apple with accessory/component pricing. Maybe removing the dock from the equation would save more money that we're assuming?

Also, they'd also save on distribution as the box for this thing could be truly tiny (though admittedly not sure how significant a cost saver that would prove).