It’s worth noting that not all game releases will follow Nintendo’s pricing formula. The Switch 2 release of Street Fighter 6 Year 1-2 Fighters Edition retails for $60, and the re-release of Square Enix’s Bravely Default is going for $40, the exact same price the 3DS version launched for over a decade ago.
Game-Key cards have clearly labeled cases to tell you that the cards don’t actually hold game content.
Credit:
Nintendo/Square Enix
One possible complicating factor for those games? While they’re physical releases, they use Nintendo’s new Game-Key Card format, which attempts to split the difference between true physical copies of a game and download codes. Each cartridge includes a key for the game, but no actual game content—the game itself is downloaded to your system at first launch. The cartridge must be inserted each time you launch the game, just like any other physical cartridge.
These cartridges will presumably be shareable and sellable just like regular cartridges, but unlike the first-party Nintendo games above, they hold no actual game data, which makes them cheaper to manufacture. It’s possible that some of these savings are being passed on to the consumer, though we’ll need to see more examples to know for sure.
What about Switch 2 Edition upgrades?
The big question mark is how expensive the Switch 2 Edition game upgrades will be, and what the price gap (if any) will be between games like Metroid Prime 4 or Pokémon Legends: Z-A that are going to launch on both the original Switch and the Switch 2.
But we can infer from Mario Kart and Donkey Kong that the pricing for these Switch 2 upgrades will most likely be somewhere in the $10 to $20 range—the difference between the $60 price of most first-party Switch releases and the $70-to-$80 price for the Switch 2 Editions currently listed at Wal-Mart. Sony charges a similar $10 fee to upgrade from the PS4 to the PS5 editions of games that will run on both consoles.
Nintendo will also use some Switch 2 Edition upgrades as a carrot to entice people to the more expensive $50-per-year tier of the Nintendo Switch Online service. The company has already announced that the upgrade packs for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will be offered for free to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers. The list of extra benefits for that service now includes additional emulated consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 64, and now Gamecube) and paid DLC for both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8.
This story was updated at 7:30pm on April 2nd to add more pricing information from US retailers about other early Switch 2 games.