No one was expecting anything else anyway, but Nintendo seems to have thought it best to be on the safe side in this case.
If there’s one thing Nintendo isn’t known for, it’s competing in the race for the fastest console hardware, whether portable, stationary, or both, as in the case of the Switch.
That this also applies to the Switch 2—which comes as little surprise—was confirmed by Nintendo in aQ&A session following the console’s unveiling in 2025.
Takuhiro Dohta from Nintendo’s Entertainment Planning and Development Department commented on this topic as follows:
We wanted to create an experience that as many players as possible could enjoy, rather than one made exclusively for those who prefer high-performance hardware.
- Presumably, the price is meant to be the decisive factor that enables (or prevents) the broadest possible accessibility.
- The Switch 2 currently costs around 430 euros,though that will change soon. The PlayStation 5 Slim, on the other hand, costs just under 500 euros, the Xbox Series X about 550 euros, and the PlayStation 5 Pro nearly 800 euros.
- Gaming PCs, meanwhile, can easily cost a four-figure sum. In the case of the graphics card, this can even apply to a single component of a gaming PC.
- Another possible target of this statement: the increasingly common handheld competitors such as Valve’s Steam Deck, Asus’s ROG Ally (X), or Lenovo’s Legion Go, some of which (though by no means all) cost more than the Switch 2.
The name shouldn’t raise false hopes either
Kouichi Kawamoto from Nintendo’s Planning and Development Department also participated in the Q&A session.
According to him, there were at times other plans regarding the name besidesSwitch 2
. However, they were ultimately discarded to avoid creating false expectations:
We even considered ideas like “Super Nintendo Switch.” But the Super NES, which came out after the NES, couldn’t play NES games. Since the Switch 2 can play Switch games, it didn’t seem right to us to use the same naming convention as the Super NES.
The Switch 2 is a new system with improved performance, but we want players who get their hands on it to focus not on the technical specs, but to view it as the latest system developed by Nintendo.
Nintendo’s Switch 2 was released on June 5, 2025.In addition to the standard version for just under 430 euros, it is also available in a bundle with Mario Kart World for 480 euros.
The handheld’s display features Full HD resolution at a refresh rate of 120 hertz. The console can also output 4K images in docked mode. Depending on the title, upscaling is used to achieve sufficiently high FPS rates.
