 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime. I am your host, Nathaniel Rumpeljantz and today we got to talk about the fact that during Nintendo's financial briefing yesterday when investors got to ask questions, it came up that Nintendo themselves might actually be considering raising the price of Nintendo's Switch, which is really interesting considering that one, we're almost through the sixth year of the platform and by now most other companies would have lowered the price of their platform to keep it selling well and also because Nintendo's Switch sales are down 19% year over year so if sales are down, why would you do something that could cause sales to, well, maybe be hurt a little more by making your product more expensive? And this is interesting because while Nintendo is not going to raise it now nor this holiday, we could see a price hike in 2023 and what does this do for the idea of Nintendo releasing new hardware next year? If they're already going to hike the price of the current Switch, that would make it sound like if they were going to release new hardware it would be even more expensive wouldn't it? So let's talk about that because we're getting this off an article from Rooters Japan so this is a very well sourced article. These are from people that were actually at the investors meeting and here's what the article says. It says Nintendo President carefully considers Switch hardware price hike. Here's what Shintura Furukawa said about raising the price. We have no plans to raise the price of the home game console Nintendo Switch at this time. It is certain that the yen has continued to depreciate in recent years so we will continue to carefully consider the situation while keeping an eye on the situation for potentially raising the price in the future. Now look, this doesn't necessarily mean that the price is going to get raised and Nintendo has been asking this question a couple times because the yen itself has been depreciating in value significantly to the point that it is actually hurting profit margins. When people talk about how can they sell Switch OLED for $50 more when you can get a Steam Deck for $400, well what we have to remember is every sale of Switch has to be converted into yen because that is where Nintendo is based. Their base value isn't based in US currency, it isn't based in the Euro, it's based in yen. So every sale overseas has to be re-converted to yen and as the yen weakens it makes those sales worth less. So yeah, ideally if they were a US based company they would go off the US value, the USD value but unfortunately that doesn't matter because the USD has to be converted into yen and yen is basically hitting massive inflation rates at rates that are way higher. We're in a recession factually in many parts of the world and yet the yen itself is seeing massive inflation and that's causing Nintendo to not really make a lot of profits. Now they're making still pretty good money and $100 million more yen in revenue. Compared to the year prior just because they've been selling a crapload more software and obviously they're not talking about raising software prices at this point but it's interesting because yes Nintendo did lower their forecast of Switch to $19 million for this fiscal year and presumably Nintendo Switch would probably sell less than $19 million next year maybe closer to $15 million if I had to just take a shot in the dark and we talked about how maybe this means it's time for Nintendo now that they're on the downswing to maybe start considering releasing new hardware. But with the yen worsening it makes it really hard to do that at least you know in a economical sense because look if they have to if they feel like they might have to raise the price of Switch next year which by the way they have been refusing to do to this point but if they say oh man we gotta we gotta hike at 20 bucks well that is significant because that means a new platform would have to launch probably at at least 400 and while many of you guys might be willing to spend that sort of money Nintendo might look at that as hey these these components are more expensive we might actually lose money at $400 USD right you know they sell it at $399 that might actually be a loss now Nintendo is not losing per switch unit right now and typically what happens over time is that you know switch and and other electronics become cheaper because the components become cheaper but due to the unique situation of the pandemic and the chip shortages things haven't actually gotten that much cheaper at manufacturing meanwhile inflation rates are skyrocketing especially in japan and now we're at this point where Nintendo's like man we might you know we're not doing it yet but we are watching the market and we will consider possibly doing that in the future that is huge that's quite big impressive now what does this mean in general well if you own a switch now you have to worry about anything but if you're someone who's thinking about buying a switch next year or even a Zelda special edition you can maybe see how Nintendo's actually already played around with the pricing this year because since the switch OLED came out every special edition switch OLED has costed $10 USD more and people were yelling at Nintendo over this look at them they're being ridiculous you don't get anything extra with it it's just the console they didn't do this for the animal crossing one they didn't do this for the mario one back in the day so here we are Nintendo is being crazy and hiking the prices of their special edition switches the pokemon one as an example is 360 dollars and yet as we sit here today it sort of makes financial sense why they're doing it they have already technically hiked the price just only of special editions will they hike the price of everything i don't know so i'm interested what you guys think about this and what do you think this means for the longevity of switch by the way i know that some people think i'm really down on switch if you like there has to be a new hardware next year i just want to throw out there 19 million sales in a year is incredible it's still higher than the peaks of most systems when they're peaking in sales so switch is still you know thriving the software is thriving switches are still selling i know right now this holiday season in the united states switch is probably the easiest to get platform and i get that that's not necessarily true in japan it's so fairly difficult to get one in japan readily and easily i'm not saying that you can't just go buy one i think there was some stock on amazon japan just yesterday they're number one online retailer but you know you go in person a lot of stores are still sold out they're not doing lotteries anymore so it's not as bad as it once was but it's still it's not a great situation in japan so they're not as readily stocked as we are but i think that might change in december because then they'll you know focus on if you guys didn't know their sort of black friday big sales season is right at the end of december ours is obviously in november so there could be a priority in stock right now to the u.s as they're trying to get as many units and stores before we get to the big sales period and we have pokemon coming out which assuredly might actually push sales it would be interesting that nintendo actually beats their projections but nintendo did note the semiconductor thing is getting better and several other investors in tokyo have thrown out through this week that they don't really buy nintendo semiconductor uh you know claims because they are paying attention to manufacturing and noticing the semiconductor issues are actually getting significantly better and a new factory opens next year so look this might have nothing to do with the launch of new hardware but what i will say is it's quite interesting that nintendo is considering raising the price and what i want to know are what you guys think about this down in the comments below and if you made it this far into the video you know subscribing to the channel would just be swell also if you're looking for a comfortable chair even racing's got your back why don't you go check that this link in the description just go to nintendo prime for 20% off all right guys thank you so much for two to the end uh we'll see about the podcast tonight i'm not sure if we're gonna have a podcast episode tonight uh there's a few things going on one the reason we didn't have prime five today was because i wasn't feeling well last night and yeah i got up and did what i needed to do took care of my responsibilities but i decided for the best interest of my health that i needed to get extra sleep today so i missed the indie world which by the way for those who want my thoughts on the indie world incredible incredible incredible sports story is all i needed it's dropping in december looks better than ever inscription was officially announced even though we've already known so look yeah it's it was a pretty good indie world to me i know some people want hollow night i get it we all want that game i could clearly not come in this year so anyways guys thank you so much for tuning in and i'll catch you guys in that next video