If you thought scoring a PS5 in 2020 was a personality-building exercise in suffering, congratulations, Nintendo just cranked the difficulty to "Dark Souls with a credit card." The Switch 2 finally got its big reveal, and within roughly eleven seconds, every preorder button on the internet turned into a slot machine that only pays out disappointment.
Here's the part that's genuinely unhinged: retailers apparently can't agree on when preorders even open.
Walmart said one thing, GameStop said another, and Best Buy just quietly changed its page at 3 a.m. like a raccoon rearranging your recycling.
Nintendo, meanwhile, is running a lottery system for its own online store, which is a fun way to remind you that you are not a valued customer, you are a number that may or may not be chosen by the house.
The console itself is a solid upgrade on paper.
Bigger screen, better kickstand, magnetic Joy-Cons that hopefully won't drift into the afterlife within six months, and enough horsepower to finally convince third-party developers to stop porting games from 2014.
It's backwards compatible too, which means your 400-hour farming sim and your neglected backlog both survive the transition.
That's the good news, and it's genuinely good.
The bad news is the price, which starts at $449.99 and climbs fast once you factor in a game that costs $79.99 and a memory card you'll absolutely need because modern games are the size of a small moon.
Nintendo looked at inflation, looked at your wallet, and decided to introduce a new premium tier like it's an airline charging you for the privilege of sitting down.
Then there's the actual buying experience.
Bots scooped up inventory faster than a human thumb can tap "add to cart," and Twitter is now a cursed support group where grown adults post screenshots of error pages like they're sharing war stories from a battlefield nobody volunteered for.
If you got one, you're either very lucky, very fast, or you know a guy.
If you didn't, Nintendo would like you to know the next batch is "coming soon," which is corporate for "we'll see." The messiest part is that none of this is technically anyone's fault, yet everyone's furious anyway.
Nintendo underproduced, retailers fumbled the rollout, scalpers did scalper things, and the internet blamed each other.
It's the same play we've run for every console launch since 2020, just with a red logo and a new set of tears.
The hardware looks like a real generational leap, and the launch lineup is stronger than the last console's "here's a remaster and a dream" era.
But paying $200 over retail to a guy named Chad with 47 confirmed sales is not the move.
Wait for stock, wait for a bundle, and let the launch chaos settle into something resembling sanity.
Honestly, the Switch 2 will probably be great, and we'll all pretend we didn't spend a weekend refreshing a webpage like it was a stock ticker.
The real product Nintendo is selling here isn't a console, it's the shared trauma of trying to buy one.
Final Thoughts
And hey, if you're mad about the preorder disaster, you're not wrong, but you're also still going to buy it the second it's back in stock.