Despite Nintendo’s legendary control-freakery — or, in some cases, because of it — the company looked a little unsure of itself in 2025. Perhaps it was the pressure. After a reported delay from late 2024, Nintendo finally had to bite the bullet and release a successor to what, by now, is surely its most successful console of all time: the Nintendo Switch.
That sounds like an enviable position to be in, and it is, but leader of the pack is never where Nintendo has been at its most innovative or at ease with itself. Strangely for such a conservative company, Nintendo is never better than when throwing caution to the wind on the comeback trail from a timid failure — following the GameCube with the Wii, or the Wii U with the Switch. Putting its managers and designers in the position of responsibly managing success appears to stress them out, entrench their conservatism, and deplete their best ideas.
This kept threatening to happen all the way through the Switch 2’s launch year, but it never quite did. There were PR faux pas and there was mangled messaging. There were unpopular pricing decisions. The games were fine, but by Nintendo’s lofty standards, most of them left a little to be desired. And in the end, none of it mattered. With an enviable lack of drama, the Switch 2 smoothly sailed to the biggest console launch of all time.
This may have been foreordained, but at times this year it didn’t seem like it was guaranteed. 2025 began with the Switch 2’s official unveiling amid a flood of leaks. Nintendo refused to budge from a strict PR schedule that was an exact Xerox of the Switch launch campaign, despite the advanced state of its manufacturing preparations meaning the new console was practically out there already. In that context, the basic launch video and predictable premise — it’s called Switch 2, it looks like a Switch, it has Mario Kart on it — prompted a widespread shrug: Is that it?
Then there was the long wait until the full reveal in April, an event that was nothing if not substantive — plenty of detail, plenty of games — but that still left observers with many questions. The first of these was: Wait, does it really cost $450?
It says everything about the shocking escalation in the cost of anything with microchips in it over 2025 that, nine months later, it seems quaint that we thought this seemed too expensive. Remember when the Trump administration’s tariff policies were the enemy of affordability, and not the rampant expansion of AI datacenters that is making processors and memory chips more valuable than gold? Those were the days!
With hindsight, we can now recognize that, while Nintendo may have got many of the details wrong this year, with this one crucial decision, it hit the bullseye. Through both lucky timing and good judgment, under enormous pressure but drawing from immense experience in the market, Nintendo executed a perfect retail strategy for the Switch 2. The killer blow was a sub-$500 sticker price for the Mario Kart World bundle, which looked like an even better deal after the widely derided decision to sell that game on its own for $80. It was enough stuff for just the right side of too much.
Can Nintendo sustain this pricing? As the cost of components soar, the company may have to choose between the frying pan (reduced margins, maybe even selling Switch 2 at a loss) and the fire (a price hike). Both will be deeply unappealing to management. But that’s a 2026 problem, one to contemplate after Nintendo has sold a conservatively projected 19 million of the things during its current fiscal year.
In the face of this roaring hardware sales success — and Mario Kart World’s 92% attach rate — it seems trivial to bring up consumer-unfriendly policies like the physical Game Key Cards that don’t have the games on them, or risible missteps like the decision to sell the spectacularly dry demo suite Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour instead of just giving it away, or the penny-pinching and brand pedantry behind the existence of such products as Super Mario Party Jamboree — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV Upgrade Pack.
It’s more instructive, perhaps, to pick up a Switch 2 and remember what Nintendo’s hardware designers and engineers got right. The console has slipped so unobtrusively into our lives — just as it was intended to — that it’s easy to overlook how accomplished it is. It’s surprisingly powerful, supremely elegant, built and finished to a high standard, packed with features, and in design and usability terms it runs rings around the PC handheld competition at a lower price point.
Backward compatible, appealingly designed, competitively priced: the Switch 2 makes a good case for itself. This is just as well, because the games don’t yet make an overwhelming case on their own. As a developer and publisher, Nintendo had a bit of a 7/10 year. Mario Kart World is exquisitely executed in the details but feels half-realized and chafes against some player preferences. Donkey Kong Bananza is a boldly conceived, big, dumb blast that doesn’t touch the sides any more than a banana does. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a disappointment you can play on Switch anyway; Pokémon Legends: Z-A a passable detour.
And yet. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo, and that includes doing something as inexplicable and brilliant as commissioning Masahiro Sakurai to make a sequel to a 20-year-old cult cartoon racing game that critics hated — in a Mario Kart year! It sounds stupid, and it’s not going to win any console wars, but Kirby Air Riders is smart fan service, great counter-programming, and a pure shot of video game joy. No other company in games can swerve like this, any more than they can release overpriced, barebones remasters of a couple of old platformers — Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 — and get away with it because the games are literal, timeless perfection.
The Switch 2’s amazing sales start doesn’t guarantee its long-term success. The price of silicon poses an existential threat to it, and if Nintendo’s game developers don’t start firing on all cylinders soon, it could run out of steam. But the pressure’s off now, and Nintendo can be itself again. There is always the looming possibility that this storied company will, one day, run out of ideas. But I remember thinking that before the Switch; I remember thinking that before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And just look what happened.
