NINTENDO NEWS – On its home turf, Nintendo will launch a different model of the Nintendo Switch 2, which is due out in two months.

Presumably to combat foreign scalpers looking to take advantage of the weak yen, Nintendo announced Wednesday that the “Japanese/Domestic Only” version of the Switch 2 will be the only Switch 2 console available for purchase at general retailers in the Asian island nation. The “Domestic Only” console will be available at a lower price (49980 yen/$334) at retail stores. The console will only be available in Japanese, and only with a Nintendo account created in Japan, or an account with that setting since its creation.

So we’ll have a region-blocked Nintendo Switch 2 (the first Switch didn’t have one!), but there’s no need to worry about the Japanese company making such a move elsewhere. The more expensive model, which retails for 69980 yen ($467), will have multi-language support, but this will only be available in Japan through the local My Nintendo Store. Reselling has become a serious problem in Japan, and Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa recently said that the company would take action against it with its next console. This could be a good response to really crack down on scalpers.

Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games industry consultancy Kantan Games, told VGC that most Japanese consumers are unlikely to be bothered by the Switch’s region lock: “Japan is an extremely important market for Nintendo, now more than ever in its history. The current Switch costs only 33,000 yen in Japan – the equivalent of $220. This means that Nintendo will once again ‘subsidize’ Japanese users with the domestic version of Switch 2 to ensure that they continue to dominate the market here. The vast majority of Japanese users do not care about multilingual hardware, so the price of the international version is inconsequential,” Toto said.

Source: VGC