Nintendo has finally followed through on the promise that it would tell us more about the Switch 2 in April. During a mammoth hour-long Nintendo Direct, it unveiled a whole heap of details, including that all-important release date: 5 June.
The console will launch at $449.99 in the US, AUD$699.95 in Australia and £395.99 in the UK when pre-orders go live on 9 April. That's a bit more than many people were hoping in the US, about what we expected in the UK, and a chunk more than the $299.99 launch price of the original Switch.
The Switch 2 will be available in a bundle with the also-announced Mario Kart World for £429.99, AUD$769.95 and $499.99 in the US, which again suggests that the US is being hit harder here. In a world where tariffs are being weighed up in multiple directions by some very large economies, it's perhaps not the biggest shock in the world that the price isn't all that low, though.
We also got some other financial revelations from the presentation, though, since we also found out that the "Nintendo Switch 2 Edition" versions of games that we'd heard mention of before will not be free upgrades, in at least some cases. Nintendo showed off upgrades to the likes of Mario Party Jamboree and both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
All of them offered better graphical performance in the form of frame rates and resolution, but Nintendo said that each would be a paid upgrade, without providing immediate details on how much that upgrade would cost.
In some ways, this mirrors how Sony has handled things in many cases with PS5 versions of PS4 games, but some of these have been offered for free. It'll be interesting to see how Nintendo handles this on a case-by-case basis.
Still, this slightly removes the dream that you'll be able to plug in an original Switch version of a game and immediately get performance benefits for free – we now know it'll generally cost money. That's life!
The presentation was an absolute doozy, though, full of games. There are almost countless third-party titles coming to the console, many of them on launch day, and some huge reveals, including a new game from FromSoftware – The Duskbloods.
