Within hours of President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would impose double-digit tariffs on all imports from nearly every country, markets reacted negatively with stock sell-offs and plummeting share prices.
Nintendo has responded by delaying orders of the Switch 2, its highly anticipated new gaming console, as a direct result of Trump’s tariffs.
Nintendo unveiled the console—a fully updated version of the Switch, first released in 2017—on Wednesday and announced it would be available for preorder on April 9, ahead of a June release. But hours later, Trump announced tariffs on dozens of countries—including 24 percent on Japan, where the company is based, and 46 percent on Vietnam. As Daniel Idfresne wrote for Reason last month, Nintendo planned in 2019 to shift console production to Vietnam “to avoid Trump’s trade war with China.”
On Friday, Nintendo announced it would take a step back. “Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” a representative told CNBC. So far, the June release date is unchanged, but a new preorder date is yet to be announced.
There is precedent for the move. Nintendo exited the Brazilian market in 2015 over that country’s high tariffs. It did not return until 2020, one year after then-President Jair Bolsonaro lowered taxes on imported games and consoles.
In January, as Trump threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico, video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella said prices would likely rise as a result. “With 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico on the way, I can see a sharp downtick in the number of disc-based games that get released physically in the US, as much of that production infrastructure is in Mexico,” Piscatella wrote. “If they do get made, I expect higher prices both [on physical and digital games].” (Trump has paused the tariffs on most Mexican products and did not impose any new ones this week.)
In October 2024, Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote that Trump’s threatened tariffs could increase the cost of video game consoles by 40 percent, or about $250 on average. At the time, that estimate was based on a 60 percent tariff on China and a 10 percent or 20 percent tariff on every other country; a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam likely upends that analysis.
In a sense, the price and availability of video games aren’t the most important thing in the world. But it’s indicative of the inherent backwardness of Trump’s protectionist trade policies. “Two-thirds of the nation play video games at least one hour per week, and almost 80 percent of U.S. households own at least one gaming device,” as Idfresne wrote. And the consoles are not cash cows: Nintendo’s profit per Switch is only about $40–$80. Increasing the cost of imports by 46 percent will completely skew the calculus and put the consoles even further out of reach for the average consumer. The Switch 2 was already slated to cost $450, a significant increase over the original’s launch price of $300. GameSpot reports that as a result of the tariffs, “it is likely we will see [a] sizeable increase in the console’s price before it is relisted.”
