Pretty much since the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct concluded earlier this week and folks actually discovered how much they’ll have to pay for the stuff they’d seen, there’s been a massive discourse rumbling away about the price of the console, as well as games like Mario Kart World and the Switch 2 Welcome Tour.
As of writing, even after yesterday’s first post-Switch 2 Direct Treehouse livestream had its chat relentlessly spammed by folks demanding Ninty “drop the price” in all caps, the console maker is yet to make any official moves designed to pour water on the fire of discontent. Why? Well, a couple of former Ninty staff have had a go at answering that question, based on their knowledge of the company.
Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, who were both senior PR staff at Nintendo of America before leaving the company in 2022, have offered their views on the situation via a video on their YouTube channel, Kit & Krysta. “I do think that [Nintendo] are a bit surprised by how severe this reaction is,” Yang said, “Now, I will say that they knew very well going into this that this was going to be a point of contention. Not completely surprised, because they omitted it from the Direct for a reason.”
“I suspect that the strategy for [April 3] was was well we have Treehouse live and that’ll give people a deeper look and a deeper understanding of this game,” Ellis added, “so let’s not rush to do anything until that has happened, but now they got ‘bam, right in the face’ with the drop the price [comments] for a whole day of programming that they had the comments on, they had to look at that as embarrassing for them – that’s really hard for the people that are on that [broadcast].”
Yang suggested that it’s likely the Nintendo comms team will have recommended that the company put out some kind of official statement on the matter, but outlined that the process for doing so isn’t necessarily straightforward.
“The problem is they are kind of like bad at doing this now, because they haven’t had a need to do a lot of crisis communication for eight years,” she explained, with the pair adding that the approval process for this kind of statement – given the nature of the backlash – could involve going all the way up the corporate ladder to company president Shuntaro Furukawa, via something like “20 [or] 30 different people along the way”.
“They’ve lost this almost like scrappiness and flexibility around decision-making and around changing around their plans,” Yang summarised. Both her and Ellis also provided some examples of previously having been able to quickly respond to things quickly on behalf of the company during their time there, by grabbing developers to shoot a video while on the E3 show floor, or leaning on former Nintendo of America CEO and president Reggie Fils-Aimé if they needed a strong spokesperson to serve as a public-facing “shield” for developers or the company.
How do you want Nintendo to respond to this Switch 2 pricing backlash? Let us know below!
