Nintendo announces a slew of price hikes, beyond just the Switch 2

Plus: A Nintendo legend retires, the company’s headcount rises, a 3DS game sells more copies and Sony has some bad/good news about Bungie

Nintendo Switch 2. Image: Nintendo

The two biggest first-party video game companies in the world issued multiple jaw-dropping announcements to wrap up the week, as Nintendo and Sony provided updates on Friday about the past year of sales and their expectations for the year ahead.

Nintendo announced no less than 20 price changes to its products, including increases to the cost of the Switch 2 in the U.S., Canada and Europe, effective September 1 and the increase in various Switch 2 and original Switch models in Japan, effective May 25.

In the U.S., the Switch 2 price will increase from $449.99 to $499.99. The latter is what Nintendo previously charged for a Switch 2 bundle that included the launch game Mario Kart World.

Nintendo also announced changes in prices for Japanese memberships to its Nintendo Switch Online service and to various lines of physical playing cards.

“We sincerely apologize for the impact these price revisions may have on our customers and other stakeholders, and we deeply appreciate your understanding,” the company said in a statement alongside the list of new charges.

Nintendo competitors Sony and Microsoft already raised the prices of their current-gen consoles last year, around the time when Nintendo raised the price of the original Switch and on Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo blamed its rising console prices on changing “market conditions.” It said it expected to incur ¥100 billion ($638 million) in costs this year, due to “higher prices for components such as memory, as well as the impact of tariff measures.”

Electronics makers in gaming and beyond are grappling with soaring prices for computer memory chips, as the supply is gobbled up by firms that want to use them for computing-intensive generative AI.

During a Sony briefing to investors in Tokyo this morning, the company’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, said that sales of its PlayStation 5 in its 2026 fiscal year (April 2026-March 2027) would likely be constrained by the chip shortages

“We plan to base our PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices, and we expect hardware profitability to be essentially the same as FY25,” she said.

Having just been ahead of the memory issues, Nintendo did have a huge first year with the Switch 2. Nintendo said today that it sold a whopping 19.9 million units of the hybrid console/portable in its first nine months of release, between the machine’s June 5, 2025 launch and March 31, 2026.

But it announced this morning that it expects to sell just 16.5 million—more than three million less—Switch 2 systems across the 12 months spanning April 2026 and March 2027. It attributed the expected drop to aggressive player adoption of Switch 2 in year one and “price revisions.” (For what it’s worth, Nintendo likes to set its forecasts low and revise upward, but it’s still notable that they’re stating an anticipated drop.)

Nintendo also had some big news of another sort.

In a rundown of “personnel changes of company officers,” the company revealed the retirement of Takashi Tezuka, a game creator whose early Nintendo resume, per Moby Games, includes:

• Super Mario Bros. - assistant director

• The Legend of Zelda - director

• Super Mario World - lead director

• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - director

• Super Mario 64 - assistant director

Tezuka’s retirement follows those of other multi-decade senior Nintendo game directors and producers, as tracked by VGC.

There were some other notable Nintendo bits of news, but let’s get to the big Sony one.