If you’re so worried about the Nintendo Switch sequel that you’re hovering your mouse over the buy button months before its official announcement, you can relax a bit. Nintendo is promising that they’ll beat the scalpers simply by making enough Switch 2s to go around.
The legacy Japanese game maker told investors their main strategy for ensuring customers don’t turn toward scalpers is flooding retailers with enough consoles at launch. During an investor Q&A held late last month, as transcribed using Google Translate, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said the company would produce “sufficient numbers” of the sequel Switch. As first reported by Video Games Chronicle, Furukawa further mentioned there may be extra efforts to combat the scalpers in different regions.
The biggest boon for scalpers around the time the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X first hit store shelves was the semiconductor shortage during the height of the COVID pandemic. It took Sony until 2023 to declare no more issues with the PS5’s supply chain. Though Nintendo’s popular portable console also felt the sting of manufacturing cutbacks, the company’s president stated that shouldn’t be an issue. He said, “There were times when we were unable to produce hardware… at this point, we do not believe that the shortage of parts will have a major impact on production.”
While you can’t scalp concert tickets without drawing the ire of the IRS, console scalping is legal, at least in the U.S. Scalpers often use bots to drain retailers of their online stock before selling the devices at inflated prices. The pandemic exacerbated the PS5 scalping issue since there were far fewer open shops to buy Sony’s latest console. Few expect the same to occur with the rumored PlayStation 5 Pro, mainly because Sony claims its manufacturing issues leading to limited supply are a thing of the past.
The Q&A also holds a few more interesting tidbits from Nintendo’s president surrounding some hot-button topics in gaming. When asked whether the longtime Japanese game maker was considering using generative AI in games, Furukawa said that while modern AI can be “more creative, it also comes with issues such as intellectual property rights.”
“We have decades of experience in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers,” Furukawa continued. “While we respond flexibly to the development of technology, we cannot simply create new things through technology alone.”
Nintendo just got done with one of its most substantial Nintendo Directs ever. Several landmark games areon the horizon, like a Princess Zelda-headlined Legend of Zelda: Echos of Wisdom and the return of a first-person Samus Aran in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Several of these games are slated for 2025, and we expect they’ll bridge the gap between the current Switch and the sequel console that won’t get an announcement until late this year or early next year.