"We're in kind of unprecedented territory": Analyst says there's hope for a Switch 2 and GTA 6 bump, but "are you going to pick food, or are you going to pick a new game?"

Mario Kart World screenshot for Switch 2 showing Wario blasting ahead with a host of characters right behind him in a desert biome.

The base price of the Nintendo Switch 2 remains $449.99 in the US despite the Trump administration's ongoing and chaotic tariff rollout, but those tariffs have already sparked US price hikes on a range of Switch 2 peripherals. Analysts expect the Switch 2's core US price to hold for now, but veteran games analyst Mat Piscatella of Circana reasons that the US games industry is largely caught in "contingency planning" as it enters "unprecedented territory," despite big hitters like a new Nintendo console and a new GTA on the horizon.

"I think folks want to be optimistic about things like Switch 2 and GTA 6 coming into the market," Piscatella tells GamesRadar+, "but this looming cloud of tariffs and the impact and what's happening on the trade side of things, and how that might impact products like accessories and hardware and that type of thing, it's just, no matter what industry you're looking at, you're looking at this stuff going, okay, what happens next?"