Nintendo couldn't screw up 2025's Switch 2 launch, no matter how hard it tried
The company made mistakes and Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza weren't all they could have been, but the launch was a record-breaking success
Despite Nintendo’s legendary control-freakery — or, in some cases, because of it — the company looked a little unsure of itself in 2025. Perhaps it was the pressure. After a reported delay from late 2024, Nintendo finally had to bite the bullet and release a successor to what, by now, is surely its most successful console of all time: the Nintendo Switch.
That sounds like an enviable position to be in, and it is, but leader of the pack is never where Nintendo has been at its most innovative or at ease with itself. Strangely for such a conservative company, Nintendo is never better than when throwing caution to the wind on the comeback trail from a timid failure — following the GameCube with the Wii, or the Wii U with the Switch. Putting its managers and designers in the position of responsibly managing success appears to stress them out, entrench their conservatism, and deplete their best ideas.
This kept threatening to happen all the way through the Switch 2’s launch year, but it never quite did. There were PR faux pas and there was mangled messaging. There were unpopular pricing decisions. The games were fine, but by Nintendo’s lofty standards, most of them left a little to be desired. And in the end, none of it mattered. With an enviable lack of drama, the Switch 2 smoothly sailed to the biggest console launch of all time.
Photo: Nintendo
This may have been foreordained, but at times this year it didn’t seem like it was guaranteed. 2025 began with the Switch 2’s official unveiling amid a flood of leaks. Nintendo refused to budge from a strict PR schedule that was an exact Xerox of the Switch launch campaign, despite the advanced state of its manufacturing preparations meaning the new console was practically out there already. In that context, the basic launch video and predictable premise — it’s called Switch 2, it looks like a Switch, it has Mario Kart on it — prompted a widespread shrug: Is that it?
Then there was the long wait until the full reveal in April, an event that was nothing if not substantive — plenty of detail, plenty of games — but that still left observers with many questions. The first of these was: Wait, does it really cost $450?
It says everything about the shocking escalation in the cost of anything with microchips in it over 2025 that, nine months later, it seems quaint that we thought this seemed too expensive. Remember when the Trump administration’s tariff policies were the enemy of affordability, and not the rampant expansion of AI datacenters that is making processors and memory chips ? Those were the days!