It’s Not a Sale. It’s a Evacuation.
Listen to me. You need to listen. That email you just got from Nintendo, the one screaming about “Cyber Deals” and “50% off,” is not your friend. It’s a siren. A blaring, high-pitched alarm telling you to get out of the building before it collapses. But almost no one is hearing it.
They see a discount. They see a price drop on a game that NEVER goes on sale. And they think, “Finally! Nintendo is being generous.”
Wrong. So wrong it’s terrifying.
This is not generosity. This is a fire sale. A purge. A calculated, cold-blooded effort to squeeze every last cent out of a platform they are about to leave for dead. And the breadcrumbs are all there, leading to a cliff. A cliff they are happily watching us march towards. Because the mention of a “Black Friday 2025” sale with “Switch 2 games” isn’t a typo. It’s the plan. It’s the smoking gun.
The Timeline of the Trap
This isn’t happening overnight. It’s a slow, deliberate conditioning. A multi-phase operation designed to manage their inventory and your expectations, right before they pull the rug out from under millions of unsuspecting families. You have to see the phases for what they are.
Phase 1: The Lull (Right Now) – Flooding the Market
This is where we are now. The “deals.” The sudden price drops on evergreen titles like Mario Kart and Zelda. Games that have held their value for years are suddenly getting 20, 30, even 50 percent slashed off their price. Your first instinct is joy. Your second should be pure, unadulterated suspicion.
- The Unprecedented Discount: Nintendo doesn’t discount its A-list games unless it has to. For years, they’ve operated on a principle of perceived value. A five-year-old Mario game still costs sixty dollars because it’s *Mario*. The moment that changes, the ecosystem is in trouble. And it’s changing. Now.
- The Digital Push: Notice how many of these deals are heavily promoted on the eShop? That’s not an accident. They want you buying digital. They are desperate to get you hooked on a library you don’t own, that you can’t trade in, and that might not have a guaranteed path forward to their next console. They are building your digital prison and you’re paying them for the bricks. Every digital purchase is another bar on your cage. Because once they shut down the Switch eShop servers in a few years—and they will, just like they did with the 3DS and Wii U—those games are gone. Forever.
- Clearing Physical Inventory: At the same time, retailers are getting massive incentives to clear shelf space. The deals on physical cartridges are a way to empty warehouses. Think about it. Why would you clear out your most popular products unless you needed to make room for something new? Something incompatible? Something that makes the old stuff obsolete? It’s inventory 101.
Phase 2: The Acceleration (2024) – The Death Rattle
The sales won’t stop after the holidays. They will get more frequent. More aggressive. You’ll see flash sales. Spring sales. Summer sales. Bundles that seem too good to be true. And they are.
This is the console’s death rattle, disguised as a party.
And the whispers about the “Switch 2,” or whatever they call it, will become a roar. We’ll see patent filings. We’ll see “leaks” from manufacturing partners in Asia. The algorithm of the internet will be fed, bit by bit, with details about the new hardware. And every new detail will be designed to make your current Switch feel older. Slower. Less capable. The screen won’t seem as bright. The load times will suddenly feel excruciating.
They are psychologically devaluing your hardware. It’s a classic marketing maneuver. They create the disease (the feeling of having outdated tech) and then sell you the cure (the new console). These sales are just the first symptom. The first cough.
Because why else would that 2025 Black Friday ad leak? It’s not a mistake. An intern didn’t just ‘oops’ and publish the wrong asset. That’s a carefully coordinated trial balloon, meant to plant the seed of the next generation in the minds of the public and, more importantly, investors and retailers. It signals that the timeline is already set. The factories are already being retooled. The decision has been made. And your Switch is now officially on a countdown clock.
Phase 3: The Endgame (2025) – Planned Obsolescence Realized
The prophecy fulfills itself. That “Black Friday 2025” ad becomes reality. The Switch 2 is on the shelves. It’s shiny. It’s powerful. It runs games your current Switch can’t even dream of.
And what about your library? The one you just spent hundreds of dollars on during these “amazing” sales?
Silence. Or worse, a complicated, messy transfer system that doesn’t fully work. Remember the chaos of the Wii to Wii U transfer? Remember the heartbreak when they announced the 3DS eShop was closing, turning billions of dollars of digital purchases into digital dust?
History is screaming at us. Nintendo has a track record of unsentimental, brutal platform transitions. They do not care about your legacy library. They care about selling you a new box and a new set of games. Full stop.
And the biggest tell will be backward compatibility. If the Switch 2 doesn’t have a physical cartridge slot for original Switch games, then every single physical game you bought becomes a piece of plastic in a box. A memory. And if they don’t guarantee a 1:1 transfer of your eShop purchases, which they have NOT, then you just funded their next hardware cycle with a library you effectively rented.
This is the trap. They get you to double-down on a dying platform, loading you up with cheap software so you feel “invested,” right before they announce the platform is a dead end. It’s a sunk cost fallacy in action. You’re left with a pile of games for a console you no longer want to use, and a burning desire for the new one that they are conveniently selling for $400.
Don’t be a pawn in their multi-year inventory management strategy. Don’t look at that 50% off sticker and see a deal. See it for what it is. A tombstone. The final, desperate gasp of a console they are already moving on from. The clock is ticking. Don’t get caught holding the bag when the music stops. Because it’s about to stop, and very, very soon.
