The Switch 2 finally has a release date, and if you thought the PlayStation 5 launch was rough, you have not tried buying a console in 2025.
Retailers opened preorders this week and most of them sold out in under nine minutes.
Parents who promised their kids a new console for the summer are now staring at a browser tab that says "currently unavailable." Here is what makes this one sting more than usual.
The new model starts at $449, and that is before you buy a single game.
Nintendo's flagship titles are now $79.99, which means a console plus two games runs a family close to $650 after tax.
For a lot of American households, that is a car payment.
The scarcity is not an accident, and that is the part worth sitting with.
Retailers are limiting purchases to one per household, which sounds responsible until you realize it just pushes everyone toward the same handful of listings.
Within an hour, resale pages were flooded with consoles priced at $700 and up.
The people who got one were not the people who waited longest.
They were the people with the fastest internet and a saved credit card.
There is something genuinely broken about a system where a toy becomes a speculative asset before it even ships.
Nintendo says it will restock through the year and has asked retailers to cancel bulk orders.
It is also the same promise every company makes right before nothing changes.
The tech itself, to be fair, looks solid.
The screen is bigger, the Joy-Cons finally feel like they will not drift apart in a year, and backward compatibility means your old library still works.
If you can find one at retail price, it is probably worth it.
That "if" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence.
We have turned buying a gift for a kid into a test of reflexes and luck, and then we act surprised when people get angry.
Somewhere along the way, the launch stopped being about the console and started being about who gets to feel like a winner.
The honest advice: do not pay a scalper, set a restock alert, and be patient.
The console will be available in a few months.
Final Thoughts
Your kid will survive the wait, and you will keep the extra $250.