The Switch 2 Costs $500 Today, and $450 Is Probably Gone for Good

Consoles are supposed to get cheaper as they get older. Starting today, the Nintendo Switch 2 costs $50 more than it did yesterday, and yesterday was the last day you can buy one at the price it shipped with.

Nintendo of America moved the standard Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 on September 1, 2026. That is the plain box: console, two Joy-Con, no game. If you have been circling this purchase since launch, you have until stores close.

What Nintendo actually said

The price revision notice runs six sentences and explains almost nothing. “Beginning on September 1, 2026, Nintendo of America will revise the MSRP of the Nintendo Switch 2 system in the U.S. from $449.99 to $499.99,” it reads. “This is in response to various changes in market conditions, which are expected to extend over the medium to long term.”

“Various changes in market conditions” names no cause. “Medium to long term” is Nintendo telling you, as gently as a Nintendo press release can, not to wait this one out. The rest of the notice covers what stays put. The original Switch keeps its price. Latin American pricing is still coming. Nintendo says it understands “that pricing changes can be challenging for customers.” Games and accessories go unmentioned.

The US is not alone, and it took the worst of it. Canada goes from $629.99 to $679.99 CAD on the same day, and Europe moves from 469.99 euros to 499.99 euros. Those are single digit percentage bumps. The American one is 11 percent, on a console whose US launch was already reshuffled once by trade policy when Nintendo delayed preorders in April 2025 to work out what tariffs would do to the math.

The bundles do not get you around it

Nintendo announced two new ones on August 25, both priced off the higher number. The Nintendo Switch 2 + Mario Kart World Bundle lands in late September at $549.99 with a full download of the game and a three month Nintendo Switch Online membership, which Nintendo scores as $37.98 in savings. On October 22, the day Nintendo Switch Sports Resort launches, a $529.99 bundle pairs the console with that game and the same membership for $27.98 off.

Both are real discounts against September prices. Neither is a workaround. Buy the console, Mario Kart World and three months of Switch Online separately today and you come out about $12 under what the bundle will cost in three weeks, with a physical option Nintendo's digital bundle does not give you.

Where the pressure is coming from

Nintendo never said the word memory. Most of the rest of the hardware industry has. AI data centers have been buying high bandwidth memory faster than anyone can make it, and the companies that make it have pointed their capacity at those higher margin server parts. Contract prices for DRAM and NAND climbed roughly 60 percent quarter over quarter in the spring, and TrendForce still has DRAM rising another 13 to 18 percent this quarter. Semiconductor tariffs, if they arrive, push the same direction.

Microsoft was blunter about all of this. When Xbox raised prices across its lineup on August 1, taking the Series X to $799.99, it said “console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.” The standard PS5 sits at $649.99, and the cheapest Xbox Series S is $499.99. As of tomorrow, $499.99 is the floor for a current generation console in the US.