Switch 2 Price NZ: The Console Just Went Up $170

If you bought a Switch 2 in August, you did well, and you probably had no idea. On the 1st of September the Switch 2 price in New Zealand went from NZ$799.95 to NZ$969.95, and nothing about the console changed.

That $170 is a copy of Mario Kart World and a Pro Controller, with change left over. It is also the biggest jump any market copped worldwide.

Now Nintendo did tell us back in May, which is more warning than most companies bother with. If you missed the window anyway, there is one shop still holding the line, and you have until tomorrow.

What does the Switch 2 cost in NZ now?

Nintendo Australia runs our market, and it put the change on its own site months ago. NZ$969.95 from 1 September. The original Nintendo Switch was left alone.

Put our increase next to the American one and it stops looking like a routine change.

Twenty one per cent against eleven. We are wearing roughly double the percentage hit American buyers are, on the same console, in the same announcement. Nintendo has not explained the gap and I would not hold my breath waiting.

Why did Nintendo put the price up?

The official wording is "various changes in market conditions, which are expected to extend over the medium to long term."

Read those last five words again. That is Nintendo quietly telling you this is not a blip and there is no point waiting it out.

The actual reason is memory, and it is the same reason your next laptop will hurt. AI data centres are eating the world's DRAM and NAND supply, because the three companies that make almost all of it earn far more selling high bandwidth memory to server farms than selling the ordinary stuff that goes into consoles. TrendForce has DRAM contract prices climbing another 13 to 18% quarter on quarter through Q3 2026, with NAND up 10 to 15% on top. Gartner reckons DRAM and SSD prices combined rise about 130 per cent across the year.

The Switch 2 ships with 256GB of storage, eight times the original. In 2025 that was a bullet point. In 2026 it is a line on a bill of materials that has roughly doubled.

None of which makes it a New Zealand problem specifically. It is the same machinery behind the pricing story most of us get wrong.

What are the shops actually charging?

Here is the useful bit. Nintendo sets a number, but the shops decide what you pay, and one of the big three has not moved yet.

Noel Leeming is at NZ$879. That is $90 under Nintendo's number, one per customer, and the listing says the offer ends tomorrow, 8 September. There is 12 months interest free on it as well, on the usual finance terms.

Mighty Ape is at NZ$968, or NZ$958 if you pay for Primate. PB Tech is at NZ$969, which is Nintendo's figure to the cent.

One thing to plan around: the bundles have dried up. Mighty Ape lists both the Mario Kart World and Pokémon Pokopia bundles as sold out, so you are buying a bare console and a game separately. At PB Tech that is another NZ$123.99 for Mario Kart World or NZ$137.99 for Pokopia. Budget for it, because the bundle was where the value used to sit.

Should you buy a Switch 2 now?

If you were buying one this year anyway, do it today. The Noel Leeming price is the only number under $900 I can find at a major retailer, it dies tomorrow, and the next sale will discount from NZ$969.95 rather than the old figure. Nintendo has told you it considers this permanent, and memory contracts are still climbing. Waiting for a correction is a bet against the entire semiconductor industry, and you are not going to win it.

If you were only half sold, the math has shifted enough to reopen the question properly. The original Switch was untouched by all of this, and the OLED model is NZ$658 at PB Tech. That is $311 less for a library of hundreds of games people still actually play. For an eight-year-old who wants Mario Kart and could not tell you what a frame rate is, that is the smarter buy right now.

Importing one yourself is not the escape hatch it looks like either. Once you have added GST, freight and the border levy, the numbers usually land back where you started.

FAQ