A potentially huge boo-boo was recently spotted by numerous sources (including ourselves) on the Canadian Toys R Us website, which suggests that the mega-retailer could have some juicy intel that much of the internet is dying to know. Nintendo’s recently-unveiled next-gen Nintendo Switch platform briefly appeared on the Toys R Us Canada site last night, listing the base hardware at $329.99 CDN. For reference, that’s around the neighbourhood of $250 USD, £200 for the U.K., 26,000 Japanese Yen, and is roughly the same $330 sum in Australian dollars. You can check out the listing below:
While some suspected that this could be a placeholder price, Toys R Us Canada has since taken the listing down, which has only done more to highlight the likelihood that this price is indeed real, and Toys R Us Canada slipped up. Bear in mind that Nintendo has not and will not comment on Nintendo Switch again until their previously-announced presentation on January 12th, 2017 however, so there’s still a chance that the price could be different in the end. Nintendo has already confirmed that the platform’s price and release date will be announced that day, inevitably alongside various launch window games.
This price point also lines up with some reports out of British game retailer, GAME that a standalone Nintendo Switch will be sold for £200 in the U.K., with a £250 option that includes a higher internal storage capacity and a pack-in game, rumoured to be the all-new Mario game that was glimpsed in Nintendo Switch’s reveal trailer. Should these reports be accurate, they seem to suggest that Nintendo is going to try to compete with Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One via a lower price point for Nintendo Switch, similar to their approach with the highly successful Wii versus Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 during the previous decade.
The option of a standalone device, and a device with more memory and a pack-in game however, is a strategy taken from the Wii U’s launch in 2012, which offered a standalone basic white Wii U console with 8GB of internal memory for a lower price, with a slightly higher-priced option netting consumers a 32GB black Wii U console that also included a copy of well-received minigame collection, Nintendo Land. A $330 CDN price for a platform that Nintendo won’t sell at a loss also seems to suggest that Nintendo Switch will be easy and cost-effective to produce, especially compared to the Wii U, hopefully avoiding the stock shortages that plagued the Wii launch in 2006.
Keep switching to Eggplante for all major news and updates on Nintendo Switch.