If you can remember all the way back to those by-gone days of June 2025, you might recall that the Switch 2 was initially hard to find. It burst out of the gate alongside Super Mario Kart World, selling six million copies in its first seven weeks and breaking records for a console launch. Over its first three months on the market it outpaced the first Switch’s sales by a significant margin, and clearly Nintendo expected that momentum to continue. It has in Japan, but U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, European) sales of the Switch 2 started to drop in the third quarter of 2025, and didn’t rebound during the all-important holiday months of November and December. (Indeed, the games industry at large had its worst holiday season since 1995 last year.) Nintendo’s console sales during the Switch 2’s first holiday sales were down 35% from the Switch’s first holiday season of 2017, and given the holidays are when these things usually fly off the shelves, that’s some real coal in Nintendo’s stocking.
What happened? Well, what’s happened to almost everything over the last year? Trump’s tariffs, which drove all the major video game hardware manufacturers to raise prices last summer, including Nintendo, have contributed to the Switch 2’s relatively high price point. The AI industry’s impact on rising RAM and GPU prices have most likely hurt, as well. Nintendo can’t completely blame outside factors, though. Despite strong sales for Super Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and the Switch 2 version of Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the Switch 2 has yet to receive a new mainline entry from either of Nintendo’s two most notable series, Zelda and Super Mario. The Switch saw one of each in its first year. And although a number of notable third party games have been released for the Switch 2 during its lifetime, many of them have been older releases coming to a Nintendo console for the first time, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Street Fighter 6—nice to finally have access to if you only buy Nintendo consoles, but not something that’ll drive system sales.
There’s not much obvious relief on the schedule, either. The next Breath Of The Wild or Super Mario Odyssey hasn’t been announced. At least Pokémon Pokopia has been a fast seller, and notable 2026 exclusives like FromSoftware’s The Duskbloods and a new Fire Emblem game might convince some to finally pull the trigger on a Switch 2. As long as international politics and the instability of tech prices are a factor, though, Nintendo’s newest console might continue to struggle—and there’s no reason to think either of those will straighten out anytime soon.
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