The launch of the Nintendo Switch has taken place in March 2017. Its hardware configuration wasn’t bad at all for that time, was it hybrid system, designed to work as a laptop as well as a desktop console thanks to its dock mode. This hybrid design brought important limitations in terms of space and temperatures, but the big N knew how to overcome them by opting for the NVIDIA Tegra X1 SoC.

This chip has an ARM CPU with eight cores, of which only the four-core Cortex-A57 (64-bit) block is functional, and it has a second-generation NVIDIA Maxwell GPU with 256 shaders that can reach up to 393 GFLOPs. . This GPU he was only a generation behind Pascalwhich was the most advanced generation that existed on the market at the time of the launch of the Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo I could have improved some aspects of this console, such as the amount of available memory and storage, which barely reached 4GB (shared as RAM and VRAM) and 32GB, respectively. However, in general, its hardware configuration was not bad at all if we compare it with the components that were available in the market in 2017.

Why the Nintendo Switch has barely dropped in price in six years

It raised a lot of doubts, but in the end, the Nintendo Switch ended up being a huge success. The console is sold 132.9 million consoles to November 25, 2023, which is the most recent data I have been able to see. It even surpassed the combined sales of the PS4 and PS4 Pro, two consoles that launched much earlier.

On a hardware level, the console is outdated, but the possibilities it offers in terms of gaming and its excellent catalog of games, fueled mainly by exclusive franchises of the big N, played a key role in this huge success, a success that was reflected in great demand that is constantly maintained from console launch.

Clearly, if your console is selling like hot cakes and you have no real competition, you don’t feel the need to lower its price. This is the reason why the Nintendo Switch has hardly become cheaper in more than six years that it has been on the market, and the most curious thing is that the big N reduced the price of the original model only when the OLED version was launched, that is, it was she who had to “become competition”.

The huge success of the Nintendo Switch gave an important ball of oxygen Japanese companies that, as we remember, didn’t do well after the Wii U launch. Nintendo didn’t only make money from software and services, but thanks to its policy, it also received significant revenue from hardware sales (consoles sold). not lower prices unless necessary.