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Knowledge-based discourse

Fictional Switch 2 “Price Hike”

Taking time away from hawking “the Metaverse”, Matthew Ball graced us with a galaxy-brained take (via—you guessed it—Chris Dring):

Nintendo is hiding “a pretty big price hike” from you!

… All because the Mario Kart World bundle is no more. He equates it to a ~10% price hike in order to offset rising memory costs:

Screenshot of <https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/im-pretty-frightened-by-the-dram>: Nintendo has already raised the Switch 2 price over the DRAM crisis… you just haven’t noticed
Screenshot of <https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/im-pretty-frightened-by-the-dram>: “I think people aren’t recognizing that Switch 2 has done a pretty big price hike. Nintendo has just been able to hide it, but they might not be for much longer,” Ball tells us. He adds: “Nintendo terminated the Switch 2 bundle with Mario Kart after three to four months. That’s really early. And I suspected it is primarily a DRAM thing. It’s $449 for the Switch 2. It’s $80 for Mario Kart. That’s $530 all in.
Screenshot of <https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/im-pretty-frightened-by-the-dram>: if you wany Mario Kart, you now have to spend $80… they’ve done a price increase for the 85% of customers that buy Mario Kart. They now have to spend $30 more. That’s getting close to a 10% increase.

It would’ve been a neat conspiracy theory if not for the fact that the bundle was announced to be time limited right from the start (April 2025, with decision made even earlier). Wearing his financial bro hat, Ball further predicts that Nintendo will raise the Nintendo Switch Online prices to imitate the $5.1B/yr PlayStation Network.

[Update] Mere four days later (2026-03-02), it was announced that all tiers of NSO subscription will get a price drop in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico (and possibly other LATAM markets) starting from April, as confirmed by Necro Felipe. Excellent comedic timing.

[Originally posted on 2026-02-26 Pacific Time]