Despite rising production and shipping costs, Nintendo is eager to avoid increasing the cost of the Switch for the time being.
With people spending , the last thing you’d want to see happen is for the hobby to become even more expensive than it already is.
Increased costs for manufacturing and shipping has already led to Meta bumping up the price of its . So, since companies like Nintendo are also being affected, it’s only natural to wonder if its console will follow suit.
For the time being, Nintendo seems to be adamantly against making the Switch any more expensive, with president Shuntaro Furukawa saying the company wants to ‘avoid pricing people out.’
He doesn’t appear to rule out the possibility, however, saying a price increase isn’t being considered ‘at the moment.’
Furukawa also can’t say if Nintendo will meet its Switch sales targets for the fiscal year. During the last financial update from the company, it was discovered that Switch sales overall have .
Although the future is uncertain, Furukawa believes upcoming games will help give ‘a boost to hardware.’ It recently released and has new Splatoon and Pokémon games slated for September and November, respectively.
When asked by how Nintendo is faring with ongoing semiconductor shortages, Furukawa says ‘With cooperation from various business partners, we’re on track for improvement from the latter half of this summer.
‘But in terms of our sales forecast of 21 million units for the fiscal year through March 2023, we only have a clear production outlook for this year. Beyond that, things are uncertain.’
He adds that the problem Nintendo is facing isn’t so much the procurement of parts, but that ‘demand exceeds supply’. Basically, it can get the parts it needs just fine, but it can’t get enough to meet the demand from customers.
This all lends further credence to the theory that Nintendo has no new hardware, like the , in the pipeline since it’s too busy contending with the semiconductor shortages and dwindling sales of the current Switch.
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