It's giving "buy before the servers go down" energy. According to GamesIndustry.biz, Nintendo Switch 2 sales in Japan cratered by a whopping 87% following a massive pre-hike buying surge ahead of the May 25 price increase. That's not a sales slump - that's a cliff dive with a piano tied to it.
The pattern here is classic gamer behaviour: complain about the price, buy it anyway before it gets more expensive, then complain louder. Japanese consumers basically performed a coordinated speedrun of retail therapy, scooping up units en masse before Nintendo's cost revisions kicked in and made the whole thing sting even harder on the wallet.
An 87% drop is the kind of number that makes quarterly reports look like a horror game cutscene. To put it in perspective, that's not a dip in the stats - that's the graph falling off the map like you walked past the skybox boundary in an open-world RPG.
So... is this actually bad news for Nintendo?
Not necessarily. The pre-hike surge means a ton of units still moved, which is a win on paper. The real question is whether post-revision demand can recover or if Japanese consumers are going to sit this one out like a frustrating raid boss they've decided simply isn't worth the grind.
Nintendo's price revision strategy is a calculated gamble - take the short-term hit on optics, bank on brand loyalty carrying the long-term numbers. It's worked before. Whether it works again with the Switch 2 in a market that's always been fiercely price-sensitive is the real final boss of this fiscal year.
For now, the scoreboard reads: consumers 1, momentum 0. Nintendo is probably less worried than the graphs make it look - but that 87% figure is going to be screenshot-shared into eternity regardless.
