If you're gonna do that you'd be better off just including a controller I think.

For the moment anyway, Switch 2 really isn't that expensive for a new gaming system in 2025, it's not far off what the base or OLED Switch would cost today in adjusted dollars.

2025 pricing isn't where it really 'should be' though. Everything's too expensive due to excessive inflation, tariffs, and stagnating wages. Gaming companies are also clearly getting greedier, to some degree.

By all means throw in the joycons and grip, but then be ready to basically toss that in for free. Don't be tacking another $50+ to the price. Not at a time like now.

There's a balance that needs to be struck; ideally products should be affordable, and at the same time companies need to be profitable, they're not charities and they need to pay their employees and continue to exist.

I don't envy any company trying to do business in this climate.

Common sense and being reasonable isn't solely the realm of charity. You don't take more when there's less to go around, if you can afford to, and most of the time, less now isn't a problem.

Goodwill also goes a long way being handled correctly in the right situations. PSN on PS3 for free comes to mind, along with not including a camera with PS4, then only charging $399. Also XB GP pricing, initially anyway, that kept them from falling even further. Neither of those companies are charities by any means, especially SNY throughout this gen.

Nin's free to operate as they wish, but right now would be the time to keep the hardware prices lower if at all possible.

$450 for Switch 2 is hardly unreasonable or excessive. The hardware's not cheap and as you say, everything costs more now and that includes parts, manufacturing, shipping, etc.

I'm not arguing that the SW2 SKU they've revealed is too expensive. It's borderline. I'm saying it would be beneficial to have another dedicated home console SKU for considerably cheaper.

Unless of course Nin is hoping some of those consumers will just get a SW1 instead, or that those who may have to wait for years to save up, will just have to wait. If I were Nin, I'd want to make sure SW2 takes off like SW1 and has every reason to keep up that momentum, with as little controversy as possible, like an earlier than expected price cut for example, but that's just me.

Early adopters tend to be enthusiasts who aren't bothered by price and just want the cool new console.

The time for cheaper SKUs like the inevitable Lite model will be later down the line once the initial rush is over.

That sounds a lot like greed to me, but that's just me.

It's just how the console business works. Unless your platform is a disaster, you're going to sell everything you ship initially anyway, so there's less reason to have a cut price version from day 1.

Playstation's recently retired president Shu Yoshida is confused by Nintendo opting to make a powerful, spec-focused Switch 2 instead of a cheapo gimmicky console, lol.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendo-is-losing-their-identity-shuhei-yoshida-says-switch-2s-focus-on-power-is-what-other-companies-would-do/

"To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo," Yoshida explained. "In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion. For me they are always about creating some new experience, like designing hardware and games together to create something, [an] amazing new experience.

"But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It's the larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K 120fps. They even had a hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right?

"And because it's a better Switch, the core premise of the whole Switch 2 is 'we made things better', and that's something other companies have been doing all the time."

Yoshida added that while the idea of a Switch with more powerful is undeniably a good thing because it enables certain third-party series to arrive on Nintendo hardware for the first time, he feels this is less of an enticing prospect for players who have multiple consoles and have already played those games.

What all these people conveniently either don't understand or leave out is Nintendo didn't start making hardware in 2004 with the DS. I seem to remember consoles like the NES (quite powerful for its time, anyone saying otherwise is pulling revisionist history -- the Famicom launched the same day in Japan as the Sega SG-1000 and blew the SG-1000's capabilities away, SG-1000 was more like an Atari), and their first big hardware transition was NES to SNES, the SNES largely was a spec boost over the NES and even ditched things like ROB

The DS/Wii era is over, it was a transient era for the mid-2000s and frankly was never long term a sustainable way to upgrade hardware. You can't keep inventing new gimmicks every 5-6 years and there's no guarantee a new one will be well received by an audience. Going back to iterative NES to SNES style upgrades always made more sense and if copping some Sony-style branding cues (like using the literal name Switch 2) comes with that territory in the new Furukawa-Era ... so be it.