I still have the receipt. Not literally — my mum threw it out sometime in the mid-nineties along with approximately forty issues of Mean Machines that I’d never forgive her for — but I know what a Super Nintendo cost in Britain when it launched in 1992. The standard SNES pack, bundled with Super Mario World, retailed at £150. That’s roughly £340 in today’s money when you account for inflation. The Nintendo Switch 2 launched on 5th June 2025 at £395. So here’s the uncomfortable truth Nintendo doesn’t particularly want you to sit with: their newest console costs more in real terms than their most beloved one did at launch. And yet the SNES, thirty-three years on, is worth more than it was a decade ago. The Switch 2 will be worth half what you paid for it by Christmas 2026.
I’m not writing this to be a contrarian. I’ve owned every major Nintendo console. I was there for the N64 at launch, I queued outside Woolworths for a GameCube, I bought a Wii on day one and genuinely loved it, I defended the Wii U longer than almost anyone else in my circle, and I’ve had a Switch since launch week in 2017. I’m not one of those people who dismisses new hardware out of hand because old hardware is somehow purer. But I am someone who has spent twenty years writing about gaming, fifteen of those specifically about retro hardware and its market, and the numbers around the Switch 2’s UK launch price demand an honest conversation — one that goes well beyond the usual “it’s expensive but it’s Nintendo” shrug that passes for analysis in most places.
Because here’s the thing. A boxed PAL SNES with a copy of Super Mario Kart in good condition will cost you between £120 and £180 on eBay right now depending on condition. An unboxed SNES with Mario Kart, perfectly playable, often goes for £80 to £110. The Switch 2 costs £395 for the console alone, £429 with Mario Kart World. One of these purchases will be worth more money in ten years. It almost certainly isn’t the one that costs four times as much today. Let’s talk about why — and what it tells us about where Nintendo is, where the retro market is, and what value actually means when you’re spending serious money on games hardware.
What £395 Actually Means in 2025
To understand why the Switch 2’s price point has landed with such a thud in the UK specifically, you need to understand what £395 represents relative to British gaming history. This isn’t just the most expensive Nintendo console ever sold in this country — it’s one of the most expensive gaming devices ever sold at mainstream retail, full stop. The PlayStation 3 launched in Britain in March 2007 at £425 for the 60GB model, which caused genuine outrage at the time and is still cited as a cautionary tale about launch pricing. Adjusting for inflation, that £425 in 2007 is worth approximately £660 today. So in pure adjusted terms, the PS3 launch was worse. But that comparison flatters the Switch 2 more than it should, because the PS3 was launching as a genuine home console powerhouse with a built-in Blu-ray player at a time when standalone Blu-ray players cost over £200 on their own. Sony was selling hardware at a loss and losing enormous amounts of money per unit.
Nintendo, historically, does not sell hardware at a loss. They never have. Even during the Wii U era, when the console was struggling commercially, Nintendo ensured the hardware itself was profitable. The Switch 2 is almost certainly profitable for Nintendo from day one. Which means that £395 isn’t a desperate attempt to get cutting-edge technology into your hands at cost — it’s a margin decision. A business choice. Nintendo looked at what the market would bear, looked at what they’d got away with on Switch accessories (the Joy-Con at launch were £75 a pair; they have never really come down), and decided £395 was the number. Whether you think that’s reasonable depends entirely on how much you value what you’re getting. I’ll come back to that.
The other context that matters is what £395 competes with right now. A PlayStation 5 Slim disc edition is £449. An Xbox Series X is £449. So Nintendo, historically the cheaper option at launch, is now within touching distance of Sony and Microsoft’s flagship hardware — hardware that is considerably more powerful and that runs games at resolutions and frame rates the Switch 2 can’t match. Now, Nintendo has always argued, correctly, that their games don’t need a pixel race to be extraordinary. Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t need ray tracing to be one of the best platformers ever made. But the price proximity to full-fat PS5 hardware is new, and it matters.
The PAL SNES in 2025: A Market Reality Check
Let me tell you about my loft. It’s not a museum — it’s a mess, honestly. There are bin liners full of controllers, a plastic tub containing what I believe is every PAL Mega Drive game released between 1990 and 1993, and somewhere, under a box of old Edge magazines, there’s a complete boxed PAL SNES that I bought at a car boot sale in 2003 for twelve pounds. Twelve pounds. The woman selling it had no idea what she had. I drove home feeling like I’d committed a minor crime.
That SNES, were I to sell it today in its current complete-in-box condition — console, cables, two controllers, manual, the lot — would fetch somewhere between £150 and £200. It’s gone up in value every single year since I bought it. That’s not unusual. It’s the norm for quality retro hardware in decent condition.
What Does a PAL SNES Actually Cost Right Now?
I spent an hour on eBay last week — specifically the completed and sold listings, not the asking prices, because anyone can ask anything — and here’s what the PAL SNES market actually looks like in June 2025:
- Unboxed SNES, console only, no games, tested: £45–£65
- Unboxed SNES with two controllers and leads: £65–£90
- SNES with controllers, leads, and Super Mario Kart loose: £90–£130
- Boxed SNES with Super Mario Kart (cart only, no game box): £130–£165
- Fully boxed SNES with fully boxed Super Mario Kart: £180–£280
- SNES Mini (the 2017 official Nintendo mini console): £60–£90
So the midpoint of “SNES with Mario Kart, properly set up and ready to play” is roughly £110. The Switch 2 with Mario Kart World is £429. That gap is staggering when you say it plainly. You could buy three complete SNES setups with Mario Kart for the price of one Switch 2 with its launch game — and you’d still have change.
Super Mario Kart: The Game That Never Stops Selling
Super Mario Kart on the SNES, released in Britain in January 1993, is one of the most consistently traded retro cartridges in the UK market. Loose cartridges — just the cart, no case, no manual — sell reliably for between £18 and £35 depending on label condition. Boxed copies with the manual regularly hit £60 to £100. It is, thirty-two years after release, still making money for the people who own it. The people who paid £39.99 for it new at Electronics Boutique in 1993 — which is about £90 in today’s money — are sitting on a return that beats most ISAs.
Compare that to, say, a typical Switch game from the early library. Titles like 1-2-Switch, which launched at £49.99 in 2017, now sell used for £8 to £12. Super Mario Party, once £49.99, is £20 to £25 used. Even Breath of the Wild, universally praised as one of the greatest games ever made, has declined in resale value from its launch price to roughly £25 to £35 second-hand on a good day. The only Switch titles that have genuinely held value are the ones Nintendo never discounted and never put on sale — which is its own kind of market manipulation, but that’s a different piece.
The Value Retention Argument: Why Old Nintendo Hardware Appreciates
This is the part of the conversation that tends to get hand-waved away by people who should know better. “Of course old stuff holds value,” the argument goes, “because it’s rare now and people are nostalgic.” And yes, that’s part of it. But it’s not the whole story, and the nostalgia argument actually contains within it a fairly powerful point about what the Switch 2 is going to face.
The SNES appreciates in value for several interconnected reasons, and understanding them tells you a lot about whether the Switch 2 will do the same.
Physical Media and the Permanence Problem
An SNES cartridge is, in the most literal sense, a permanent object. The ROM data is stored on chips. There is no DRM. There is no server that needs to be online. There is no account to log into. You slot it into the machine, you turn the machine on, you play the game. That experience will be available in fifty years with no intervention from Nintendo. The company could cease to exist tomorrow and every SNES cartridge ever made would continue to work in every SNES ever made. That permanence has real value.
The Switch 2, like the original Switch, relies on a combination of physical cartridges and digital purchases tied to a Nintendo account. If you buy your games physically, you’re in better shape than if you go digital — the cartridges are real objects that can be resold, that don’t disappear if a server goes dark. But the Switch 2 cartridges contain games that, in many cases, require day-one patches, online verification, or additional downloaded content to be complete. The base cartridge increasingly isn’t the complete experience.
Nintendo also has a track record that should make anyone nervous about digital ownership longevity. The Wii Shop Channel closed in January 2019. The Nintendo 3DS eShop closed in March 2023. The Wii U eShop closed in March 2023. Every game purchased digitally on those platforms became effectively unplayable for anyone who didn’t already own the hardware and have the games downloaded — and even then, you’re one broken console away from losing everything. When the Switch Online service eventually ends — and it will end, they all do — a significant portion of Switch 2 content will go with it.
The Scarcity Equation
Nintendo produced SNES hardware from 1990 to 1999 in the UK market. After that, production stopped forever. The total number of PAL SNES consoles in existence is fixed and slowly declining — units break, get thrown away, get lost in floods and house moves. The supply shrinks every year while the demand from collectors, from people experiencing nostalgia, and from new retro enthusiasts entering the hobby, remains steady or grows. Basic economics does the rest.
Nintendo will manufacture Switch 2 hardware for as long as it’s commercially viable — probably six to eight years, based on their historical cycle. They will make millions of units. There is no scarcity in the foreseeable future. In ten years, when the Switch 3 or Switch 4 is the current hardware, the used Switch 2 market will be flooded with second-hand units from people who upgraded. Price will collapse. This is exactly what happened to the Wii, exactly what happened to the DS, and exactly what happened to the Switch 1 once the Switch 2 was announced — Switch 1 prices dropped noticeably in the months before the Switch 2 launch.
Nintendo’s Own History of Abandoning Previous Generations
Nintendo is not sentimental about old hardware. They are a business. When a new platform launches, support for the previous one ends with remarkable speed. The original Switch’s eShop still functions at time of writing, but the message is clear — buy Switch 2 now. Nintendo has also confirmed that many Switch 1 games are not compatible with Switch 2 without a paid upgrade or a separate Switch 2-specific version. That means people who spent £49.99 on a digital Switch 1 game cannot simply play it on their new £395 console without, in some cases, spending more money.
The SNES never did this to you. You bought Super Mario World, you could play it on any SNES, forever, full stop.
Mario Kart: The Launch Title That Defines Everything
I want to talk about Mario Kart specifically, because it sits at the heart of this comparison in a way that’s almost poetic. Super Mario Kart on the SNES was the game that made me understand what a video game could be as a social object. I remember sitting on the carpet in my mate Chris’s bedroom in the summer of 1993 — his older brother had somehow got the game before either of us — and the four of us taking turns on the two-player mode, furious and delighted in equal measure. Ghost House was impossible. The music from Koopa Beach has lived in my head for thirty years. That game cost his family £39.99. It is, to this day, worth more than they paid for it.
Mario Kart World is the Switch 2’s flagship launch title. It costs £49.99 standalone or comes bundled with the console for an extra £34 on top of the hardware. It’s the most expensive individual Nintendo game ever sold in Britain. Thirty-two years after Super Mario Kart appeared on the SNES, Nintendo’s next Mario Kart is asking for fifty quid — and that’s before you consider the £30 booster pass that’s already been announced for additional content post-launch.
What Are You Actually Getting for the Money?
Mario Kart World is, by all initial accounts, an impressive game. The open-world between-race exploration is genuinely new territory for the series. The roster is vast. The track count at launch is higher than any previous Mario Kart. The visual presentation on Switch 2’s improved display is legitimately beautiful. I’m not going to pretend otherwise — if you want a new Mario Kart with modern features and a huge amount of content, Mario Kart World is that game.
But Super Mario Kart, running on a thirty-three-year-old chip from Silicon Valley, still does something that Mario Kart World cannot replicate with all its processing power and all its budget: it makes you feel something elemental about competition. The Mode 7 scaling — that flat, rotated plane that Nintendo’s engineers used to simulate three-dimensional racing on hardware that couldn’t actually render 3D — created a visual aesthetic so distinctive that it became permanently encoded in the visual language of gaming. You look at a screenshot of Super Mario Kart and you know exactly what it is, exactly when it’s from, and exactly how it feels to play. That clarity of identity is something money can’t manufacture.
I’m not arguing that old is better. I’m arguing that different things have different kinds of value, and that £49.99 for Mario Kart World may be technically justifiable on a content-per-pound basis whilst simultaneously being a game that will struggle to hold £49.99 of resale value in two years’ time.
The UK Retro Market in 2025: Stronger Than Nintendo Would Like
Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: the retro gaming market in the UK has never been healthier as a commercial ecosystem, and it exists almost entirely outside Nintendo’s control or profit margin. Every PAL SNES sold on eBay generates zero revenue for Nintendo. Every copy of Super Mario Kart changing hands in a Facebook Marketplace transaction, every copy of Donkey Kong Country picked up at a boot sale, every Super Metroid found in a charity shop — none of that money goes to Kyoto. And yet the demand for that hardware and those games continues to grow year on year.
CEX, the British second-hand entertainment retailer, is a useful barometer here. Their buy and sell prices for retro hardware are publicly listed and updated regularly. As of mid-2025, CEX will pay you £47 cash or £58 in vouchers for an unboxed PAL SNES, and sell one for £75. They’ll buy a loose Super Mario Kart for £12 cash and sell it for £20. These aren’t collector prices — these are high-street retail prices for thirty-year-old hardware. The ecosystem is sufficiently robust that a national chain finds it worth stocking and pricing.
The Rise of Retro Collecting as Investment
I want to be careful here, because I have complicated feelings about this shift. When I started collecting SNES hardware and games in earnest in the early 2000s, it was almost entirely about playing the games I loved. Prices were low because demand was low. The people who collected were enthusiasts — they wanted to play Chrono Trigger on original hardware, they wanted the specific feel of a cartridge sliding into a slot. The money was almost an afterthought.
That’s changed significantly in the past decade. The graded game market — where cartridges are professionally graded for condition and sealed in plastic slabs — went genuinely insane between 2019 and 2022, with sealed NES and SNES games hitting auction records that seemed divorced from reality. A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for $660,000 in 2021. The market has since corrected somewhat from those peaks, but the attention that those sales brought to retro gaming as an asset class has permanently changed how many people approach collecting.
The upshot for ordinary PAL SNES owners is that even without the graded market madness, the floor price of quality retro hardware has risen significantly. The SNES that would have been £30 at a car boot in 2010 is £70 at a car boot in 2025 if the seller has done any research at all. The market has become more sophisticated, and that sophistication generally benefits owners of existing hardware.
FPGA and Emulation: The Third Option Nobody Wants to Talk About
There’s a wrinkle in the retro value argument that I should address honestly, because I’d be doing readers a disservice if I didn’t. The rise of high-quality FPGA hardware — devices that recreate the exact chip architecture of retro consoles rather than emulating them in software — has created a genuine alternative to buying original hardware. The Analogue Super NT, for instance, is an FPGA recreation of the SNES that accepts PAL cartridges, outputs via HDMI, and is indistinguishable from original hardware in terms of timing accuracy and behaviour. It costs £179 when available.
Then there’s the MiSTer FPGA project, an open-source platform that replicates dozens of classic systems on a single piece of hardware, available for around £150 to £200 fully configured. And there’s software emulation, which on a modern PC or a device like the Miyoo Mini Plus — currently around £50 — can handle SNES emulation with near-perfect accuracy.
These options chip away, slightly, at the value argument for original SNES hardware from a purely functional perspective. If all you want is to play Super Mario Kart, you don’t need to spend £110 on a SNES setup — you could spend £50 on a Miyoo Mini Plus and play it this evening. But the retro market has absorbed this reality with remarkable equanimity. Original hardware values have continued to rise despite the widespread availability of emulation options, which tells you that a meaningful portion of demand is genuinely about the physical object, the original experience, the authentic artifact — not merely about game access.
Nintendo’s Pricing Strategy: A Company That Knows Exactly What It’s Doing
I don’t think Nintendo makes pricing mistakes. I think Nintendo makes pricing decisions that occasionally look like mistakes to outsiders but are, on reflection, calculated positions that reflect a very specific business philosophy. Understanding that philosophy is essential to understanding the Switch 2’s launch price.
Nintendo has spent four decades building one of the most powerful brand ecosystems in consumer entertainment. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong, Pokémon — these are not just game franchises, they are cultural touchstones with global recognition that rivals Disney characters in some demographics. Nintendo licenses almost nothing. They control their IP with a grip that would make other companies weep. They have almost no debt. They are cash-rich, conservative, and genuinely long-term in their thinking in a way that publicly listed Western companies rarely are.
The £395 price point is Nintendo saying, with complete confidence, that their brand and their exclusive software catalogue is worth a premium that no competitor can extract for equivalent hardware power. They’re probably right. The Switch 2 will sell. It’s selling. The launch queues were real. The pre-orders sold out. Nintendo knows their audience.
The First-Party Software Problem
Where Nintendo’s pricing philosophy becomes genuinely problematic is in the combination of expensive hardware and software prices that never decline. On PlayStation and Xbox, the first-party titles — the ones made by Sony and Microsoft themselves — tend to drop in price relatively quickly. God of War Ragnarök launched at £69.99 and was £29.99 within eighteen months. Microsoft regularly puts their first-party games on Game Pass from day one. The platforms compete on price for software.
Nintendo does not compete on price for software. Ever. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe launched at £49.99 in April 2017. It is still £49.99 in 2025. That is eight years without a single official price reduction on one of the best-selling Switch games of all time. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has barely moved from its launch price in nearly eight years. Nintendo’s argument, which is not entirely without merit, is that their games retain quality and playability far longer than most — but the practical effect for UK consumers is that the Switch 2 library will be expensive to build and will remain expensive to build for years.
Compare this to what you spend on a PAL SNES library. You can build a genuinely excellent SNES collection — thirty to forty quality games covering all the major genres — for £300 to £500 if you’re patient and buy at car boots, charity shops, and on Facebook Marketplace. That’s a complete library spanning some of the greatest games ever made, on hardware that works without internet, that you own permanently and outright, that will be worth at least what you paid for it in another decade. The maths is not flattering to the Switch 2.
Game Pass vs. Nintendo’s Model: The Subscription Question
Nintendo Switch Online, which costs £17.99 per year for an individual or £34.99 for a family plan, is Nintendo’s answer to the subscription gaming question — and it’s an answer that reveals everything about how Nintendo views the value equation differently from its competitors. Switch Online gives you a library of classic NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, and Mega Drive games as part of the basic tier. The Expansion Pack, at an additional cost that brings the total to around £34.99 individually per year, adds Nintendo 64 and Sega Mega Drive libraries alongside DLC for certain games.
On paper, this means you can play SNES games — including Super Mario Kart — through Switch Online without owning a single cartridge. And yes, you can. But the emulation quality through Nintendo Switch Online has been, charitably, variable. Input lag has been a persistent complaint. The SNES library available is curated and limited — not every great SNES game is on there. Several significant titles are absent for licensing reasons. And crucially, the moment you stop paying for Switch Online, the library disappears. You rent access. You don’t own anything.
Your PAL SNES with a physical Super Mario Kart cartridge doesn’t have a subscription. It doesn’t have input lag courtesy of emulation layers. It plays exactly as it played in 1993, through a 240p signal on a CRT if you want the authentic experience, or via an upscaler like the Retrotink 2X if you’re on a modern television. You own it. Entirely. It will work in forty years. Nintendo Switch Online will not.
The Community Reaction: Who’s Angry, Who’s Buying, and Who’s Walked Away
The reaction to the Switch 2’s UK pricing has been fascinatingly fractured along generational and philosophical lines, and it maps almost perfectly onto the retro gaming community’s own internal divisions.
On Reddit, the reaction in UK gaming communities was swift and mostly negative. Threads on r/gaming and r/NintendoSwitch UK reached front pages with thousands of comments, the majority expressing genuine sticker shock. The specific comparisons to PS5 pricing — “I can get a PS5 Slim for fifty-four quid more and it’s exponentially more powerful” — appeared in thread after thread. The £49.99 game pricing attracted particular ire, with many commenters noting that game prices have effectively increased by £10 to £15 per title compared to the Switch 1 generation.
The retro gaming community’s response has been more nuanced, and frankly more interesting. On forums and in Discord servers dedicated to retro collecting, the Switch 2 launch has provoked genuine reflection about what value means in the hobby. Several prominent retro collectors I follow have posted — with varying degrees of seriousness — that they’re putting their Switch 2 money into retro hardware instead. Whether they’ll actually do this consistently rather than eventually succumbing to the pull of new Zelda or Metroid games remains to be seen, but the sentiment is real.
The Scalper Problem, Old and New
Scalpers hit the Switch 2 launch hard. This was entirely predictable — it’s happened with every high-demand Nintendo hardware release since the NES Classic in 2016 — but the scale of it in the UK was depressing. Within hours of pre-orders opening, Switch 2 units appeared on eBay for £500 to £600. The secondary market briefly showed consoles selling for £550, a forty percent premium over retail price.
There’s a bitter irony here for retro collectors. The SNES didn’t have scalpers in 1992 — the market wasn’t sophisticated enough, and the internet didn’t exist to facilitate it. But the SNES market now has its own scalper problem, particularly around complete-in-box and sealed stock. Sealed PAL SNES consoles, which do occasionally surface from warehouse finds and old shop stock, get snapped up by professional resellers who understand exactly what they’re worth. The mechanisms are different but the effect is the same: genuine enthusiasts pay over the odds whilst middlemen profit.
The difference is that original SNES hardware scalping is a fixed-supply problem — there genuinely are only so many sealed units left in the world. Switch 2 scalping is an artificial scarcity problem that Nintendo could address through better stock management and proper reservation systems. They’ve chosen not to, or more precisely they haven’t prioritised it, and UK consumers have suffered accordingly.
What Parents Are Saying
One dimension of the Switch 2 pricing conversation that tends to get lost in enthusiast discourse is the parent perspective. The Switch 1 was, for millions of British families, the children’s Christmas present for a good chunk of the late 2010s. It hit a price point — £279.99 at launch, dropping to £199.99 for the Lite — that was expensive but manageable for a family gift. At £395 for the Switch 2, plus £50 for a game, plus whatever accessories follow, you’re looking at a £500 Christmas gift before you blink. That’s a significant ask.
The parenting forums and family Facebook groups I lurk in (I have two kids and a professional interest) are full of parents saying they’ll wait for a price drop, buy a cheaper refurbished Switch 1, or simply get something else entirely. Some of them are, entirely reasonably, pointing out that a second-hand Switch 1 with a decent game library can be assembled for under £150. Others are — and this is the bit that caught my attention — buying their kids a retro console bundle instead. SNES and Mega Drive bundles aimed at children and beginners are actively being discussed as Switch 2 alternatives by price-conscious parents. Whether those parents understand quite what they’re giving their kids — how genuinely brilliant those games still are — is another matter, but the fact that 1992 hardware is being seriously considered as a 2025 gift alternative to £395 new hardware says everything.
The Long View: What Switch 2 Will Be Worth in 2035
Predicting the future of hardware value is imperfect work, but the historical patterns are clear enough to make reasonable projections. Let’s look at what happened to Nintendo hardware that launched at significant price points and how it aged.
The Wii: A Cautionary Tale
The Nintendo Wii launched in Britain in December 2006 at £179.99. It was revolutionary, it sold in extraordinary numbers, and it was the must-have Christmas gift for two or three consecutive years. It also, within five years of launch, became virtually worthless on the second-hand market. Unboxed Wiis were selling for £15 to £20 on eBay by 2012. Complete boxed units barely cleared £30. Nintendo had flooded the market with units, the novelty of motion controls had worn off, and the software library — outside of Nintendo’s first-party output — was patchy at best. The Wii has since recovered slightly in value as nostalgia for the mid-2000s has grown, but it remains one of the worst-value retro hardware purchases you can make. A good-condition Wii in 2025 sells for £25 to £40. Adjusted for inflation, the people who paid £179.99 for it in 2006 have seen its value collapse by roughly 85%.
The GameCube: The Comeback Story
The GameCube launched in Britain in May 2002 at £129.99. It was considered a commercial disappointment by Nintendo’s own standards, outsold by the PS2 by a significant margin. For years, used GameCubes were cheap — I bought a spare one with four controllers and a memory card for £22 at a car boot in 2009, which I regret slightly less than the SNES story because I knew exactly what I was doing by then. The GameCube is now, in 2025, selling for £80 to £140 unboxed, £150 to £220 boxed. The library — Metroid Prime, The Wind Waker, Resident Evil 4, F-Zero GX, Eternal Darkness — has been reassessed as one of the great console software catalogues, and prices have followed. The GameCube is a genuine appreciation success story, but it took twenty years and a complete reassessment of its reputation to get there.
Where Does Switch 2 Fit?
The Switch 2’s likely value trajectory sits somewhere between the Wii’s collapse and the GameCube’s slow rehabilitation, but probably closer to the Wii model. Here’s why: Nintendo will sell millions of Switch 2 units. When the Switch 3 arrives — presumably around 2030 to 2032 based on Nintendo’s historical cycles — the Switch 2 second-hand market will be enormous. The physical game library will be substantial but the best games will also be available on Nintendo’s next platform. The hardware itself is not exotic or particularly rare. There’s nothing about a Switch 2 that becomes harder to find over time in the way a PAL SNES does.
My honest projection: a Switch 2 in 2035 will be worth £60 to £120 on the used market, depending on condition and what games come with it. The people who paid £395 for it in 2025 will have seen the value of the hardware component of their purchase drop by 70% to 85%. That’s not unusual for consumer electronics — it’s roughly what a television or a laptop does too. The difference is that nobody argues you should buy a television as a store of value. Some people are making that argument, explicitly or implicitly, for the Switch 2 as a Nintendo product. That argument is wrong.
The PAL SNES with Mario Kart in 2035? I’d expect £150 to £250 for a decent unboxed setup, £300 to £400 for a good boxed unit. The floor will not have dropped. The trajectory will continue upward. I’m more confident of this prediction than almost any financial forecast I’ve made in my adult life, because the patterns are thirty years old and they haven’t broken yet.
Is the Switch 2 Worth £395? The Honest Answer
I’ve spent thousands of words making the SNES look like the smarter purchase, and in terms of pure value retention, it is. But I want to be straight with you, because I think you deserve a writer who doesn’t just argue his thesis to death when reality is more complicated.
The Switch 2 is, by all accounts, a genuinely excellent piece of hardware. The improved processing power over the Switch 1 is substantial — we’re looking at an Nvidia custom chipset that delivers performance dramatically beyond what the original Switch could manage. The display is brighter and higher-resolution in handheld mode. The new Joy-Con 2 controllers are better built than the originals, with a magnetic attachment mechanism that finally feels premium rather than plasticky. The mouse functionality built into the Joy-Con 2, whilst gimmicky in some use cases, has genuine potential for specific game types. The back button has been added. The online infrastructure has been improved.
Mario Kart World, the games I’ve seen coverage of, looks genuinely brilliant. The concept of racing between tracks through an open world is the most ambitious thing the series has attempted since Mario Kart 64. Future Nintendo exclusives — the next 3D Mario, whatever Retro Studios is working on, the inevitable next Zelda — will be exclusive to this platform. If you want those experiences, you need this hardware. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole point.
The question isn’t whether the Switch 2 is a good machine — it probably is. The question is whether it’s worth £395 specifically, to you, now. And that depends entirely on who you are.
Buy the Switch 2 If:
- You are current on gaming and care about new Nintendo first-party software as it releases
- You have children who will play it regularly across both handheld and TV modes
- The original Switch is your main gaming platform and it’s showing its age
- You can afford it without financial strain — it genuinely is £395, not a deal
- You are not primarily motivated by value retention on the hardware itself
Buy the SNES Instead If:
- You want a gaming purchase that will hold or increase its value over time
- Your priority is the greatest hits of gaming history at the lowest cost
- You have children you want to introduce to genuinely timeless game design
- You’re more interested in the collecting and cultural history dimension of gaming
- You find the £395 price point difficult to justify given your gaming time
Consider Both If:
You’re me. I already have both. I have a fully set-up SNES on a CRT in my study with forty-odd cartridges in a wooden crate beside it, and I’ll almost certainly pick up a Switch 2 when a good bundle deal appears — probably around Christmas, probably at the same price but with a game included. I don’t think these things are in opposition. I think they’re complementary in the way that reading new novels and rereading old classics are complementary. Both are valid. Both are good. They serve different purposes and offer different pleasures.
What I’m resistant to is the idea that you should buy a Switch 2 at launch and feel like you’re being reasonable about it. You’re paying a premium price on day one for a premium product. Historically, the people who wait six to twelve months for a Nintendo price drop — which doesn’t always come, it must be said — or wait for a bundle deal, are making smarter financial decisions than the day-one buyers. This has been true of virtually every Nintendo hardware launch in history.
The Bigger Picture: What This Comparison Actually Tells Us About Gaming’s Direction
Step back from the specific numbers for a moment and look at what the SNES-versus-Switch-2 comparison actually illuminates. It’s not really about which is the better purchase — that depends entirely on context. It’s about a fundamental shift in what gaming hardware is and how it’s designed to be owned.
The SNES was built to be permanent. The cartridge format was chosen in part for its durability. Nintendo’s SNES hardware has a failure rate that, by the standards of consumer electronics, is extraordinary — the majority of PAL SNES units made in the early nineties still work today with zero intervention beyond perhaps a cartridge slot cleaning. The battery in save-game cartridges like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past may need replacing after thirty years, but the game itself is otherwise fine. Nintendo built that hardware to last. Not because they were noble, but because in 1992, if your console broke, the customer blamed Nintendo and didn’t buy another one. Reliability was a commercial necessity.
The Switch 2 is built to be replaced. Not shoddily — Nintendo still has quality standards — but it exists within an ecosystem that assumes a lifecycle of five to eight years, after which you are expected to buy the next thing. The software you buy digitally exists at Nintendo’s pleasure. The online services you depend on exist at Nintendo’s pleasure. The hardware itself will be superseded, supported for a transitional period, and then left behind. This is not unique to Nintendo — it’s the reality of modern platform gaming. But it is a profound change from how the SNES worked, and it has real implications for how we should think about what we’re actually buying when we hand over £395.
We’re not buying a gaming object in the way that SNES buyers bought a gaming object. We’re buying access to a gaming ecosystem for the duration of that ecosystem’s commercially active life. When the ecosystem ends, the access degrades. This is worth being clear-eyed about, especially when the price of entry is nearly four hundred pounds.
The retro market, with its exploding values and its devoted community of collectors and players, is partly a response to this shift. People are drawn to SNES hardware not just because the games are brilliant — though they are — but because the ownership model is one they can understand and trust. You buy it, you own it, it works. Full stop. In a world of subscriptions, always-online requirements, and software libraries that can be legally revoked, that simplicity has become genuinely rare. Rare things tend to become valuable things. The SNES is valuable in 2025 partly because it represents a model of ownership that the entire industry has since abandoned.
My Verdict
Here’s where I land after all of this.
The Nintendo Switch 2 at £395 is the most expensive Nintendo console ever sold in Britain. It will lose significant value. The software ecosystem around it is built on sand — digital purchases, subscription dependencies, update requirements — in a way that SNES software simply wasn’t. The game prices are high and will remain high because Nintendo’s pricing philosophy has never changed. The launch experience has been marred by scalpers and stock shortages that Nintendo could do more to address.
And yet it’s probably going to be a great machine with some of the best games of this console generation. That’s the Nintendo contradiction that’s existed since the N64, and it’ll probably exist until they stop making hardware entirely.
But a PAL SNES with Mario Kart? That’s a different kind of proposition entirely. It’s a time machine that costs less than a pair of Joy-Con 2 controllers (which retail at £79.99 a pair, by the way — yes, really). It’s a library of some of the most expertly designed games in history, playable without patches, without updates, without accounts, without subscriptions, on hardware that will outlast anything made this decade. It’s a cultural artefact that has appreciated in value for thirty years and shows every sign of continuing to do so.
The Switch 2 is a good console at a bad price. The SNES is a thirty-three-year-old console that somehow keeps getting better value for money every single year that passes. I know which one I’d be more confident buying today as a long-term proposition — and it’s the one that came out before I was in secondary school.
Both machines are in my house. Both bring me genuine joy. But if you handed me £395 and told me to choose one, knowing what I know about where gaming is heading and what things hold their value? I’d be in the loft within the hour, sorting through cartridges with a torch, grinning like an idiot. And Super Mario Kart would be on before the kettle boiled.