Nintendo rules out another Switch 2 price increase as console sales fall

Nintendo does not plan to raise the price of the Switch 2 again, President Shuntaro Furukawa said on the company's latest earnings call. Memory shortages have been driving up what players pay for rival game consoles.

The company is "not considering additional changes" to the console's price, Furukawa said. That leaves the Switch 2 where an earlier increase put it. Nintendo added $50 to the price earlier this year, bringing the starting price to $499.

The assurance came in the same week Nintendo reported a sharp slowdown in hardware sales. In its earnings report on Thursday, the company said Switch 2 sales were down 37.4 percent from a year earlier. Tom's Hardware put the decline at 41 percent and attributed it to the higher price.

Furukawa also addressed the shortage of RAM that has rippled across the electronics business. He said there had been "no major change to the memory situation." He added that Nintendo can secure "sufficient quantities" of the chips it needs.

Demand from data centers that run artificial intelligence systems is behind the shortage, which has set off a series of price increases on tech products. The pressure has reached Nintendo's own supply chain. Earlier this week, one of the companies that makes Switch 2 game cartridges announced it would stop producing ROM memory and focus on memory for data centers instead.

Nintendo's competitors have already passed higher costs on to shoppers. Microsoft has raised prices on its Xbox Series X and Series S consoles more than once. The Series S, which started at $299, now starts at $499.

The PlayStation 5 has also been through price increases, and its starting price has climbed to $649.

After those changes, the Switch 2's $499 starting price matches the Xbox Series S. It is $150 below the starting price of the PlayStation 5.