There was an announcement today from the company Nintendo on how they are releasing their new Switch 2 console in June and the price is what has a lot of people shocked. While the original system was about $300 US, apparently the starting price for this will be $449.99. That is a significant increase and the reasoning people were throwing around was fascinating.
It wasn’t so much about say the hardware cost per se. Instead, people are saying it was due to the US tariffs where Nintendo has opted to integrate the tariff fees into the price of the system. That should technically mean only people in the US would b affected. But the claim is they decided to just charge the entire world a universally more expensive price in order to prevent say a cry on how the console is so much cheaper elsewhere. In many ways, that would be like a company charging others more to try and make another country happier.
That doesn’t sit right for many of course. Imagine having to pay more for an event ticket because they want to balance out a mandatory fee that is required only for specific people. Would you do that for your business? Imagine that for an online subscription where instead of charging taxes based on the person’s residence you simply charge everyone a universal flat fee as the one who has the highest tax rate benefits from it. Would you do that?