OLED is probably better overall but it can be harder to use in bright sunshine and you have the risk of burn-in if you accidentally leave the screen turned on for hours or something.
We have two switches in our family, both first gen, one usual and one oled. Standalone, usual screen is bearable, compared to oled it is quite bad, but if the new screen is even worse?? I can’t find any explanation for this except of greediness from Nintendo
In the Switch 2 Welcome Tour app they even have demos to highlight the improvement in the screen quality compared to the switch
The leaks have been coming out for months now and say it is supposedly coming out this fall. The upcoming Legend of Zelda film sets seem to be based on Ocarina of Time, recent merchandise (LEGO sets, etc.) are based on Ocarina of Time to enhance marketing, etc.
Nintendo just dropped the official Starfox 64 remake news yesterday, so this rumor is likely pretty legitimate.
I don't play games much anymore, but that's something I will absolutely revisit due to nostalgia.
I called it years ago, but I didn’t expect how people would love to play the same story and watch the same movie over and over again. Incidentally they will be also easier to AI generate, as part of their existing data set. It truly is the end game for our stale and uninspired culture.
I missed Breath of the Wild, I’ll play it on the Switch 4 remake in a couple of years.
/rant
If you count StarFox Zero, which is kind of a remake but also not, we are on our third remake of StarFox 64. A game, mind you, which was kind of a remake of the original StarFox on Super Nintendo.
The thing is, though—Ocarina of Time is a good game. It was a good game almost 30 years ago when it first came out, and it's still a good game today. But there are generations of gamers who never played it. So why not spend some money to polish it up for modern audiences, and release it for newer consoles?
At $500, I will think twice about just buying nsw1 games, moving to thr steam deck, or digging out old consoles (which is fun too!)
I'm really having a hard time (stupid, I know) giving my kid a $500 toy. Somehow I'm ok with a $300 toy (nsw1) or even a $400 toy (old smartphone).
A lot of sellers will even throw in the peripherals for free.
I might buy up a few now while they are left.
Also never buy 1st hand desktop hardware, total waste of money, the price drop from 1st hand to 2nd hand is insane, but desktop components dont degrade that much, theyre still mostly following IBM's sane design pattern, so you're getting a massive price drop with no downside.
Like, it's a portable console, it's not a competition for a desktop PC in any way.
Japan's local currency devaluation is more about US vs Japan differences in central bank policy and interest rates (and a million other issues) and is mostly separate from DRAM prices.
They have little uncertainty to work with, they don't need their consumers as much.
They're continuing their anti consumer policies
I have a bridge to sell you …
That would normally allow them to keep prices of export goods low...
Nintendo is a very Japanese-centric, proud company. For those not aware, Nintendo has been avoiding repricing domestically until now by selling a "Japanese-only Switch" locked to Japan in order to prevent foreign arbitrage. But the currency pressure is too strong.
This is why the US always accuses (justified or not) other countries artificially keeping their currencies undervalued, by the way.
Second, the largest price increase is for the local Japanese market (and they are increasing the already-underpriced special 'Japan-only' model that they won't allow to be sold in other markets).
Something like the Switch is going to rely heavily on imported parts, and so when your currency plummets relative to others, that forces you to increase prices just to stay in the black. And yeah in looking it up, then yen has dropped about 50% against the yuan just over the past 5 years. Seems like Japan didn't learn much from the US about picking 'print money' as your economic policy. It doesn't last long when you're an economic hegemon able to export your inflation, but it's a far worse idea when you're a lesser economic power.
Exactly. Japan has held its interest rates at almost zero for years (currently 0.75%) while the US is at 3.5% and has been roughly there or higher since late 2022. Having a negative 3% interest rate gap with the world's largest economy for over 3 years is going to cause currency weakness.
This current inflation spike peaked in 2022. If anything, its been easing in 2025.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA
https://cpiinflationcalculator.com/2025-cpi-and-inflation-da...
Inflation is just one factor and is not limited to one country. This shows the US dollar vs other currencies.
I'm not trying to say anything spicy here. You can argue whether a strong currency is good or bad. But it would be silly not to acknowledge the cause. It was one of the largest global financial shocks in recent years.
> The dollar's global value has also weakened noticeably since (checks notes) April 2, 2025
> The dollar's global value has also weakened noticeably since (checks notes) the global financial world reordering that happened in early 2025, which in finance circles is often referred to collectively by the shorthand 'Liberation Day', i.e. April 2nd, 2025, during which the US currency became significantly weaker relative to other major currencies, a situation which persists until the present moment
Current Price Revised Price
United States $449.99 $499.99
Canada $629.99 $679.99
Europe €469.99 €499.99
https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-under-pressure-to-rais...
People need to go to the classic class warfare methods:
- Do not buy anything new, especially graphics cards. Buy on Ebay but avoid bidding wars.
- Use adblockers and do not pay for any company's services if the company promotes AI.
- If it is true that Nintendo is lobbying against AI in Japan, still buy Nintendo of course.
The AI people think they don't need us, let their stocks crash.
And what then? If you did manage to convince everyone to stop buying consumer graphics cards, wouldn't Nvidia just reasonably dedicate 100% of its resources to AI?
In AI, buyers are getting what they want. The demand is real. YOU might not value what they're getting, but that doesn't make it fraudulent.
This is why people misunderstand why AI isn't a bubble. A bubble is asset prices rising due to speculative demand far beyond what the actual demand is.
AI - specifically chip and memory markets feeding AI - is a demand shock on par with World War 2 in its impact. NVIDIA is legitimately forecasting demand of $1 trillion in their chips+memory by the end of 2027.
This is actual, real, shipping physical product: not vapor, not something that will disappear, not something that will "crash" suddenly.
Yes, there is some speculation among AI providers training new models in the race to AGI, but that is not the majority of demand, inference is 65-80% of demand. If the current pace of training slows, that excess capacity for training will get easily sorted out through resale markets.
The world has changed.
Mythos is marketed like a nuclear weapon to make people jealous.
AI model government approval is floated, perhaps in preparation for a government bailout justified by "national security".
Kushners are invested in OpenAI.
There is a lot of fraud going on.
> This is actual, real, shipping physical product: not vapor, not something that will disappear, not something that will "crash" suddenly.
"Not X, not Y, not Z, just A" works better than "Actually A, not X, not Y, not Z".
It's arguable that the car market is indeed fraudulent and the result of years of lobbying, destroying public transportation and car-centric architectures.
Tulips were real shipping physical products. Railways were real. Housing was real. Whether or not the demand is speculative is largely disconnected from the actual subject of the bubble.
> NVIDIA is legitimately forecasting demand of $1 trillion in their chips+memory by the end of 2027.
Forecasts do not make it so.
> but that is not the majority of demand, inference is 65-80% of demand.
Inference is massively subsidized. The demand is fictitious just because of that. Once prices go up, especially once free or cheap inference dries up, demand will collapse.
But it's not even just the subsidies. AI is forced onto the workplace top-down. Executives demand AI be used before careful evaluation. That's all demand that can collapse at any moment if public opinion sours.
> The world has changed.
It hasn't. For all the claims that AI has made any given job so much easier, developers who claim "It'd have cost me a billion years to do so" (next time bring a counterfactual), the actual economic benefit appears to be a big fat zero. We're right back to the Solow paradox.
Except AI companies are dumping trillions of dollars into this, expecting tens of trillions in return ... from where? Where will these tens of trillions come from if the aggregate economic benefit doesn't exist? Joe Slopman making a dozen CRUD apps a week for half a million in revenue, but there ain't a million of him.
So much of the demand for inference is driven by hype. Companies using AI in the expectation of an ROI that has not materialized, and in many places, is very unlikely to. In no small part because any "efficiency" or "productivity" gains realized by AI immediately drives down the cost of the good or service produced.
Thank you for being one much needed voice of reason in this hellscape of AI buffoons that’s become of HN.
It's here, it's real and it works.
Switch 2 is backwards compatible with switch 1.
Switch 2 has better FPS for Switch 1 games. Like BotW stops having terrible FPS drops in certain scenarios.
Switch 2 loads games faster. There are test videos out there, but it's up to twice as fast.
I like the joycon 2 controllers ergonomics more.
I started gaming with Nintendo's Game&Watch handhelds, Timex 2068, PC MS-DOS 3.3, Amiga, and so on, so I do understand something about upgrading hardware for speed, or deal with what one has at home.
Though I sadly learned afterwards that you could send in controllers with drift and Nintendo would fix it for free.
Of course Switch 2 is faster and the better console (it should be), but if you're focussing on raw performance you're in the wrong crowd.
Even on PS5 you have load times and performance tradeoffs. There will be a time when we're wondering how we put up with the 'impossibly slow' current generation of consoles like we're doing with the 8-bits machines now.
I read it as "I enjoy the Switch 1 games, but I want to enjoy them even more with faster load times and better frame rates"
And the DLC for various other first party games (Kirby, etc) is quite popular with the kiddo.
Thus it is hard to feel the need to be talking about the latest popular game.
During highschool we were trading Spectrum, C64, PC and Amiga stuff on the playground, no one cared about consoles.
Also, if the trip is of sufficient length, you can totally offset the cost.
When I lived in NYC, I used to travel to the UK a few times a year, and the flights between NYC and London were around $500 round trip. The cost of eating in the UK was typically 1/2 that of NYC, plus cool castles and history.
You'd probably better off taking a side trip to Korea or Taiwan.
Xbox Series X had one in June, 2023.
Nintendo Switch (original) had a price increase last year.
I don't remember this ever happening before the 2020s unless it was due to retailer shortages or markups.
Please. It’s fucking Nintendo. It deserves to be fucked over as much as humanly possible.
The Japanese Switch 2 is going up by 20%. The US model is going up by about 10%.
In Japan, the Lite is going up by over 35%. If we assume a similar pattern (US going up by about half as much as in Japan), then that'd take the $230 Lite to more like $270.
I still like my Switch Lite, but almost $300 after tax for it would be absurd.
(But if you like the games on Steam, then the Steam deck makes a lot of sense.)
Nintendo makes fun games that I want to play. I want to play the new Metroid, the new Pokémon games, Kirby DLC, etc. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I grew up with the original Metroid, and that series sticks with me.
The switch 1 gets a ton of use in my house. Switch 1 games perform so much better on the 2.
The pro controller for the switch 2 is incredible.
Switch 2 is cheaper, significantly cheaper if you play docked. Our family uses it to play docked a lot.
The switch 2 library is large enough that you can play a lot of the same titles you can on the deck. Or at least enough games you'll never run out of fun options. You don't need to have the biggest library to be fun.
I have a powerful PC in my house for when I want to play shooters and 4x games. The switch 2 library gets way more exercise.
The new Mario Kart is also great, and the larger screen is great too. At 45 I don't need to use reading glasses when I use Virtual Console, but on the OLED Switch I usually use reading glasses with Virtual Console.
Does Nintendo intentionally make its hardware really underpowered and cheap in terms of chips to juice profits? In the past this was more the case, but with the Switch 2 the hardware bill of materials is actually more costly relative to previous products like the Switch 1.
Poor timing of market forces (Sam Altman spending VC money to purchase all the world’s memory chips). Ouch.
Metroid Prime 4 looks amazing, and you can choose 4K@60 or 1080p@120. I don't really care about generated frames or whatever AI magic the console is doing to pull it off, it looks great.
They’re not “shitty PC ports”, they’re ports that people tried, likely managed to one platform and then when they tried on switch 2 realised just how far behind it is.
Performance is orthogonal to the Switch aims, which are about those tightly curated Nintendo titles.
Well this comment down below brings it about really quickly:
"Switch 2 has better FPS for Switch 1 games. Like BotW stops having terrible FPS drops in certain scenarios."
If you need a newer-gen piece of hardware to run an older-gen FIRST PARTY title at acceptable speeds without issues then I'm going to say you are ABSOLUTELY and PURPOSEFULLY selling underpowered hardware (and Nintendo has been doing it since the days of the NES. So many first-party titles with slowdowns because the hardware was not up to the task.)
BoTW was still generally acceptable to people: https://www.metacritic.com/game/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-o...
Parts of Samus's gun and some parts of the UI are 4k.
I'm a Nintendo fan but this 4k@60 claim from Nintendo is incredibly laughable. The vast majority of the screen is upscaled.
I think there were a bunch of 4k Hatsune Miku games that came out. It turns out that 2D renderings at 4k can be accomplished with very low end hardware.
The game looks good because Nintendo has excellent artists. So I guess it's worth the money. But the technical specs are completely baloney.
It more than gets the job done, the job I hired it to do is make the games impress me visually and allow me to experience the thrill of technological progress, and it does that very well.
Nintendo (and NVidia) are playing games with specs. And it's incredibly off-putting to me.
Lying about small things means the company will lie about large things. This sort of thing erodes trust, especially because 4k is so easy to test and figure out.
-------
There are other words for better than 1080p. Such as 1440p or 2k. Which is closer to what the new Metroid game actually does.
I have bad news for you, friend. You just described AAA gaming on anything less than a 5090 (and not even then, at all times). Without DLSS or FSR many modern games won't run smoothly at 4k on typical hardware (such as a 5070, which costs more than a Switch 2, or a 5060, which costs about the same).
That's why it's laughable that a Switch2 would play anything at 4k@60Hz.
So I'm just pointing it out and laughing at the fanboys. It is literally laughable. This is a tech site where I expected more people to know what these words mean rather than echoing (clearly bullshit) marketing points.
This is a console with 100GB/s memory bandwidth. Like come on guys. It's a whole order of magnitude to weak to make a claim like 4k@60Hz, but all the Nintendo fans are just gobbling up the marketing without thinking.
100GB/s is closer to 2010 era tech (PS3 or something) than 2025.
They know that the combination of extremely high quality first party exclusives combined with hugely popular IP is going to move units even if they're "overpriced" as devices to play any other games.
When my daughter's Switch 1 died, I had the choice between the 2 and the Steam Deck, and I chose the Deck. It's got a ton of games and the cheap Steam back catalog is great, but... no Mario? No Zelda?
I won't pretend I wasn't tempted to own both.
Twilight Princess soon
80 Dollar just to play Mario Kart?
Even older switch titles are barely ever on sale.
I never buy games at full price so the economics don't add up for me. I guess it works for the kind of person that buys games on release. If someone has that much money to burn they don't need to care about hardware cost either I guess.
It's not like most people even know what a Steam Deck is. At the moment at least, the two devices mostly don't compete for the same audience. And if you want to play Nintendo's games - which a lot of people do, they're usually quite good - you don't have much choice anyway.
I have neither devices right now, only a PC.
The Steam Deck doesn't cut into Nintendo's core audience, but it does draw away people who would have bought the Switch 1/2 for those reasons -- the audience that made the Switch 1 such an overwhelming success. Anecdotally, I've had multiple non-techies bring up the Steam Deck unprompted, usually with an impression of 'the Switch but better' and/or 'more adult-oriented'.
Historically, when the market they created starts to become saturated, Nintendo starts looking to pivot. So the Steam Deck might not kill the Switch 2, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't kill the Switch 3.
Steam basically is PC gaming at this point, which is still a massive market that is almost as big as the entirety of console gaming.
I know there are those out there, but I would be slightly surprised if a PC gamer didn't know what a Steam Deck was in 2026.
As someone who has pretty much every console system and most handhelds, I didn't spring for a Switch 2, and it is for the exact reason the thread parent mentions. I do like Nintendo games, as they are consistently high quality, but they are not usually graphics reliant for fun, and the Switch is good enough still, and I don't love paying $90 USD for a single game when I can buy $5-20 games on Steam and play them across multiple devices.
I don't think it will matter much. They live off the exclusives.
There's a reason Nintendo targets and wins with very casual gamers. It would take a lot more than a $50 price increase to be the 'nail in the coffin' for the Switch.
It's true that fewer people will be buying fewer consoles as a whole, but gaming is a pretty competitive market. I'm sure Nintendo will take a hit regardless, but probably no more than the likes of Sony, MS, Valve, etc.
Like any gold rush, the only people who win are the ones selling the shovels (in this case, Nvidia).
I feel that Nintendo should really become just a software company. All consoles are converging towards using more or less similar PC hardware anyway, so having your own hardware platform doesn't seem very useful anymore.
Yes! Famously so, in fact. Look up Gupei Yokoi and "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology".
It provides incredible value for its price (hours of fun per $) when compared to basically any other form of entertainment
Adults are VERY MUCH the target market: See page 10 of Nintendo's investor relations doc.
Insane.
I would pay 50 more dollars for the same experience if thats what it took. I do think Nintendo should provide a little more value at the new price, but it's not a huge gap.
The steam deck is more expensive as well, and the switch 2 is much more powerful than the steam deck.
One big difference is sales tax. If you remove the 20% VAT and apply the currency conversion, a European Switch would cost an American $472 after these changes. Tax is added here, so it could cost an American as much as $550 back home.
But then why are they also increasing the price of their online services? The games run locally!
Fuck you, Nintendo.
> Effective Date of MSRP Revisions in Japan: May 25, 2026
> Effective Date of Price Revisions in the United States, Canada, and Europe: September 1, 2026