Sick of seeing limited hardware go to greedy resellers, Nintendo’s community is fighting back hard against scalpers exploiting the Switch 2 launch. Organized online efforts aim to shut down listings before they can fool buyers.
As always, the announcement of a new Nintendo console — in this case, the long-awaited Switch 2 — comes with massive anticipation… and unfortunately, an equally predictable wave of scalping. But unlike the chaos surrounding the PS5’s launch, where scalpers hoarded units and flipped them for astronomical prices, Nintendo fans aren’t sitting this one out. They’re mobilizing to fight back — and they’re getting results.
Preorders for the Switch 2 have now gone live in most regions, with the exception of the U.S. and Canada, where import tariffs continue to complicate matters. Predictably, resellers were quick to act, reserving consoles en masse to resell them at jacked-up prices. Listings have already popped up asking €700 or more — but this time, the Nintendo community isn’t taking it lightly and is mounting a campaign to shut it down.
Nintendo Gamers Are Organizing Against Resale Abuse
One key battleground is eBay. The platform updated its pre-sale policy in 2023 to require that the gap between purchase and delivery not exceed 40 days. Since the Switch 2’s official release isn’t until June 5, 2025, any current listing violates that rule. Fans have caught on quickly, flooding Reddit and other forums with coordination threads, encouraging each other to mass-report these listings — doing manually what eBay’s bots aren’t fast enough to catch.
While eBay does penalize accounts for violating this policy, scalpers can still squeeze in transactions during that 40-day window — especially targeting buyers who aren’t aware of the platform’s rules. To combat this, Nintendo fans have even gone as far as sharing pre-written reporting templates, designed to streamline the takedown process and help remove illegal listings as efficiently as possible.
Nintendo itself saw this storm coming and took steps to minimize the damage. From the outset, they ramped up console production, but more notably, they restricted early reservations to players who had racked up a certain amount of playtime on their original Switch. Even so, scalpers have found ways to bypass these protections, and multiple listings with multiple preorders have already surfaced on eBay. The battle continues — but this time, Nintendo fans are better armed than ever before.
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