On Wednesday, Nintendo revealed all regarding the Nintendo Switch 2, including announcing that pre-orders were set to begin on April 9. The next day, the Trump administration announced wide-reaching 10% tariffs on pretty much every country. There were higher tariffs on certain nations, including China, the EU, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and many more. Today, Nintendo has announced that they are delaying the start for pre-orders due to the tariffs.
Nintendo released a statement that reads:
“Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025, is unchanged.”
Regarding the tariffs, the ESA has said that they believe these tariffs will have negative impact on the video game industry.
“We really are, at this point, just watching and trying not to have knee-jerk reactions, because we don’t think that what President Trump announced this week is the end of the story, but what was announced this week and the tariffs as outlined, we do expect these tariffs will have a real and detrimental impact on the industry and the hundreds of millions of Americans who love to play games,” Aubrey Quinn, Spokesperson for the ESA says. “And so our goal is to work with the administration, to work with other elected officials to try to find a solution that doesn’t damage U.S. industries, U.S. business, but also American gamers and families.”
Quinn noted that the detrimental impact wouldn’t just be the cost of systems. It’s “hard to imagine a world where tariffs like these don’t impact pricing.” She says that consumer spending will also be impacted, which in turn will impact company revenue. If companies see their profits drop, that will in turn impact jobs, as well as investment in research and development, and even what the next generation of consoles looks like. “The entire consumer ecosystem is connected,” she says.
Quinn says that things have been slow since a lot of this new Trump administration is made up of new people, so they haven’t been able to leverage relationships from the last term Trump was President.
“But yes, the short answer is we know who the conversations need to be happening with, and we are working on making connections and making sure that they understand that we are eager to work with them to find solutions that this is about public, private sector conversations happening, so we can understand and make sure that they see the impact and the risk of impact to business, to consumers, and really everything that’s happening within the US borders,” Quinn said.
The ESA recently joined a coalition of trade associations to reach out to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and express their concerns prior to the tariff news earlier this week. The ESA is asking for meetings with a number of legislations and members of the administration to discuss similar topics.
“Yes. I can tell you conversations are happening with… I don’t want to say every level,” Quinn said. “I’ve not met with Trump, right? So I don’t want to say every level of government, but certainly we’ve met with members of the administration. We’ve met with employees at the White House, we’ve met with employees at USTR [the office of the United States Trade Representative], so yes, we are having conversations and we’re also doing that in partnership with other associations to make sure that… This isn’t a video game issue. I represent the video game industry, so I’m very aware of the impact on the video game industry, the potential impact, but it’s not a video game industry. This is going to affect all consumer products from food to fashion to electronics.”
Quinn concluded with:
“You know what? It’s been interesting with media coverage around video games and tariffs because just unfortunate coincidental timing that the Switch [2 reveal] was the same day as President Trump’s announcement. There are so many devices we play video games on. There are other consoles, but as I was saying, VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games, if we think it’s just the Switch, then we aren’t taking it seriously. This is going to have an impact.
And even American-based companies, they’re getting products that need to cross into American borders to make those consoles, to make those games. And so there’s going to be a real impact regardless of company. This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry. There’s going to be an impact on the entire industry.”