Inside Nintendo's Big Switch 2 Blowout Extravaganza
A dazzling showcase, controversial pricing, and E3-style press tour where no real questions were answered
Nintendo’s Switch 2 Direct felt like Christmas. It took forever to arrive, the expectations kept building up, and now that it’s over there’s a post-holiday hangover punctuated by painful dollar signs.
Highlights from the reveal included Mario Kart meets Forza Horizon and a 3D Donkey Kong with shades of Mario Odyssey that sports impressive destructible environments. Games can output at up to 4K resolution on a display, run at up to 120fps in handheld mode, and Switch Online is finally getting GameCube games with graphical enhancements.
Less impressive was the mysterious C button’s new GameChat function, a suite of built-in voice chat and screen sharing features best described as Discord but worse. It will also be paywalled after the first year. Hitpoints’ Nathan Brown described it as a “button you have to pay in order to press, a regrettable first for the videogame industry.”
Most important of all was what Nintendo didn’t mention in the Switch 2 Direct. The price of $450 trickled out via a press release, followed by Mario Kart World breaking the $80 barrier, and Donkey Kong Bananza establishing $70 as the new standard next-gen pricing for the platform.
The vibes quickly soured as each new bit of info trickled out. Battery life worse than the original Switch, physical games potentially priced $10 more than their digital counterparts in some territories (Update: the U.S. seems excluded from this), and some physical game cards just being glorified DRM keys requiring full downloads. Features like QR codes for sharing creations in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom locked behind a $10 upgrade fee.
By the time Nintendo tried to share gameplay deep-dives of its exciting new releases in Treehouse livestreams on YouTube the chats were just flooded with people shouting “drop the price.” The gloom cast by Trump’s unhinged trade war announced the dame day that would threaten fresh 34-46% taxes on imports only made things worse.
This is not the stuff Nintendo wants people talking about. Someone who works at a PlayStation studio claimed to me it was “all fist bumps” after the announcement. The Switch 2 is the same price as an all-digital PS5 where games like Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII Remake are already available and much cheaper.
Alongside the Switch 2’s online rollout, the company was hosting a parallel event IRL for hundreds of media and content creators in a New York city showroom full of demo stations for Mario Kart Tour, Donkey Kong Bananza, and third-party ports like Cyberpunk 2077 ($70 and only 40fps in docked).
The event began in a separate building with coffee and pastries where press and influencers watched the Direct in real-time. “One of the loooudest audience reactions was the laughter that erupted in the room when Switch 2 World Tour was announced as a paid digital game and not a pack-in title,” one attendee told Dead Game.
They were later shuffled into another building where a very small picture of Mario on a very big TV screen apparently greeted taste-makers at the sign-in desk. Multiple adjoining rooms included demo stations for lots of stuff shown during the Direct, including the World Tour which actually has some really cool mini-games. Different color wrist bands denoted how much time attendees got to spend on the mini-E3-style show floor.
There was a press Q&A roundtable with Nintendo staff where the company told people not to ask about politics, according to Game File’s Stephen Totilo. When a European outlet asked about the controversial pricing strategy, Nintendo reps shutdown the question before it had even been finished being translated, another reporter present told Dead Game.
“Sitting and watching the Direct, then quizzing a panel of Nintendo developers, was 100% the Nintendo E3 playbook,” Totilo told me as I in turn quizzed him on the meta-strategy surrounding the announcement.
He was actually surprised by the amount of time devoted to performance benchmarks—“not sure I ever heard Nintendo brag about frame rates for a new system before”—and sees it as Nintendo trying to prove what fans are paying for with Switch 2 (a pitch it struggled to make with previous iterative upgrades like 3DS and Wii U).
But the new hardware also arrives as game companies are more guarded than ever, and Nintendo doesn’t like to go off script. “The hardware team said multiple times that they didn't want to bore us or go into detail about certain technical aspects of the consoles despite that being the exact reason we were there,” one reporter told Dead Game.
Gamertag Radio’s Danny Peña managed to get Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto to confirm that improving the eShop performance was a key priority for Switch 2, though what specifically they did to accomplish that is unclear.
Is Joy-Con stick drift fixed? Hardware design lead Tetsuya Sasaki was similarly oblique. “They have been designed to have bigger movement and smoother movement,” he said. How long will a single charge last? The developers wouldn’t clarify despite Nintendo already listing a range of 2-6.5 hours on its website.
Why ditch the Switch’s recent OLED upgrade? “There was a lot of advances in LCD technology,” Sasaki said. “During our development, we took a look at the LCD technology that was available to us now, and after a lot of consideration, we decided to stick with LCD.” The real answer, no doubt, is keeping down costs, and upselling fans on a Switch 2 OLED in 2027.
We go through a similar song and dance every time a new Nintendo console comes out and ultimately most of it just ends up being noise. The only thing that really matters are the games. Nintendo lives in its own world is a frequent refrain among competing gaming execs and industry analysts.
As much as there can be a tendency put it in competition with the Steam Deck or PS5, the Switch 2 will succeed or fail primarily on the quality of its first-party games. What Nintendo is selling is, as The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost points out, first and foremost an appliance for powering go-karts, and the initial buzz is that it does that very, very well.
Early impressions from those who went hands-on is that Mario Kart World is great, according to Kinda Funny’s Blessing Adeoye Jr., with a new Knockout mode that might be the best twist on battles since the franchise launched. Donkey Kong Bananza is deceivingly fun with expressive gameplay and fun tunneling mechanics. “I took a survey of the press at the event, and everyone said Donkey Kong was the best game there,” wrote The Verge’s Ash Parrish.
Another hit, at least for demo purposes, was the longest-titled game ever: Super Mario Party Jamboree – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Jamboree TV. “Everyone was testing Mario Party Jamboree and the webcam and mic features so you'd periodically hear loud cheering and a lot of game journalists jumping up and down,” one reporter told Dead Game. It might have just been Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert the whole time.
What was the least popular? A certain open world wizarding sim. Multiple attendees told me the Hogwarts Legacy Switch 2 Edition demo section remained largely abandoned throughout the event. The Washington Post’s Gene Park agreed, though it’s unconfirmed if that’s because of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s transphobia or the fact Hogwarts Legacy, despite being a best-seller, is quite boring. “To be fair I fucking hate the game too,” Park said on the Punching Up podcast.
The most divisive takes coming out of the Nintendo event ended up not being about the Switch 2 (solid), or the games (excellent), or even the price (ouch), but rather the onsite catering. What do you feed over 200 people who will tell the world whether the next-gen experience you’re selling is worth $450?
“Some chicken stir fry and a bit of tofu stir fry, and some veggies,” one person told me. “It was perfectly fine! It wasn’t like takeout food. It was well prepared.”
Another was more helpful.
“Lunch was a Chinese buffet of sorts with orange chicken, rice, mochi and Matcha brownies,” they said. “Then before the roundtable they had some more pastries. Lunchtime was bustling. All the creators and journos sitting at big round tables either working or just taking a load off, chatting with industry folks and felt very high school cafeteria (in a good way).”
But one person virulently disagreed.
“THE FOOD SUCKS,” they said, describing the core spread as consisting of gochujang beef and orange chicken. “It was on catered black table cloth draped tables with fancy name cards and everything and it was just…terrible.”
Playing games is sweaty business. What about drinks?
“Coffee, tea, and lemonade that was more lemon than ade,” they told me. “I love lemonade, a bit of a connoisseur. It was bad too. It was funny contrasting the terrible food with such buttoned up service. Guys were in suits! Not black shirts and pants with an apron but FULL SUITS carrying away everybody's mostly full plates of food.”
Was one of them Mario? No, there was no one present in a Mario suit, multiple people confirmed to me. Why do you keep asking me about food, they said.
Totilo had the beef. “It was fine. It was free. What is wrong with people?”