This is per BBC News, reporting that the Japanese gaming company has announced that it’s stopping plans to allow preorders for the console to begin in the U.S. on April 9, “in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.” According to the current company line, the system is still expected to launch in the States on June 5, but, at the moment, the rest of the planet will get a serious head start in terms of calling dibs on the device. (It’s worth remembering that the original Switch ran into a lot of shortage problems when it launched back in 2017, so preorders matter more for this kind of thing than you might expect.)
And all of that is before we get into the question of price, which was already looming large over the Switch 2, even before the tariffs became a factor. Nintendo announced a $450 price point for the system on Wednesday, just hours before Trump gave that press conference where he announced trade barriers on everywhere from China to, like, The Penguins Of Madagascar. There’s no way to predict what his latest international temper tantrum is going to do to a number that was already deemed by many to be shockingly high, but we’re going to go ahead and put forward a guess that “make it go down” is the least likely of possible options.
Video games are, of course, about as luxury and extraneous as consumer goods get; nobody ever starved from not having access to the fancy new console. But as a bellwether for things to come, this first domino can’t help but be anything but chilling, one of the first concrete demonstrations of what Trump’s isolationist policies will mean for a world now inextricably powered by global trade.
