Nintendo’s Ongoing PR Nightmare

I miss Reggie Fils-Aime

Today’s Nintendo has the same outward zeal for money as this Diablo treasure goblin. Photo taken by the author.

This week in gaming should have been punctuated by the joyous and fun announcement of the new Switch 2 console and its launch games.

Instead, it turned into a pile of immense player anger over high prices, uncertainty over tariffs, and a lax PR messaging strategy from Nintendo that feels wildly out of touch.

I don’t think Nintendo realized ahead of time how much of a PR hole they were walking into this week — and their lack of any meaningful response has me worried that they’re not at all up to the daunting task ahead.

Just to recap: Wednesday’s early morning Switch 2 announcement video stream lacked any sort of pricing information, which was weird. Instead, Nintendo dumped it all out afterwards in a chaotic jumble of press releases and website updates. As players sifted through the data mess, they realized that the $450 console is priced well above what many analysts and insiders expected for the US, with similar price increases over the Switch 1 in many other territories.

Even more shocking is that many games are saddled with an $80 price tag, a big push beyond the current $70 “AAA” standard.

Yesterday, the fans responded to this. Loudly. Nintendo was bombarded by thousands of online commenters screaming “DROP THE PRICE”…