Switch 2 Pre-Orders Are The Future

The Switch 2 rollout continues to be weird: As you might have heard by now, Nintendo has delayed pre-orders in the US due to Trump’s tariffs, announced via a press release to various outlets. Why you are first hearing this through the press rather than from Nintendo is a bit beyond me, and further highlights how strange this whole thing has been.

I first learned this via GameSpot. Subsequent outlets also received a statement, which The Verge attributes to Eddie Garcia for Nintendo, which reads,

Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged. 

Pre-orders for the Switch 2 were already complicated, explained in an FAQ that came out after Wednesday’s Direct. Likewise, the Switch's price filtered out after the fact through news writeups and press releases, and now we have this new information coming out in a roundabout way as well.

As MinnMax commented, all this practical information “is everywhere, because [Nintendo] didn’t name any of the prices for anything… It felt like [Nintendo] didn’t want to take [its] L.” I’m not going to spin some kind of conspiracy theory about the company making the press do its dirty work, or at the very least its most boring work, but it definitely feels unusual for a company that has a big week of trying to sell me something to be so unclear about how precisely I can buy what it’s selling. 

Now is, of course, not a great time for companies to have to tell people how to exchange money for goods. But doing so in as clear a way as possible is a company’s responsibility, not journalists’. Today’s small debacle feels like one snapshot of the confusion Trump's tariffs are going to continue to cause, and one example of how companies are likely to pass the buck for all this onto everyday people.

Meanwhile, it feels like Nintendo is doing its level best to be business as usual; it's been running its usual Treehouses since the Direct, with chats full of viewers complaining about the Switch 2’s price. Nintendo of America’s Twitter feed is full of hype clips for games, with similar comments underneath. And the rest of my part of the internet is full of people who are angry and anxious-- over a console they're excited about, sure, but also over everything. As the ESA told IGN, “If we think it's just the Switch, then we aren't taking it seriously… There's going to be an impact on the entire industry.” Replace “the industry” with “everyone who buys things,” and you have a better picture of how the weirdness around the Switch, or video game prices broadly, is just one small, clear example of how much needless suffering Trump’s tariffs are going to cause.

Delayed hardware pre-orders are, in the grand scheme of things, not the world’s biggest deal. But if Switch pre-orders are the thing that makes “the economy” feel real to more people, that helps more people see how cruel and short-sighted Trump’s latest plans are, perhaps the best use of journalists’ time right now is helping our readers make sense of that and figure out what action to take, rather than having to tell them when they can buy a console and for how much.