While Nintendo Switches may not be medically essential items during the coronavirus pandemic, they certainly are a choice way to keep people occupied as they wait out the disease cooped up in their homes — and price gougers have noticed.
Opportunistic sellers on Amazon have jacked up prices for Nintendo’s hit console by more than 52 percent since March 13, when shutdowns over the coronavirus pandemic began to hit the U.S., according to data-gathering site Thinknum.
The average price now on Amazon — one of the few places left on the internet where a stuck-at-home person can still buy a Switch — is now $452, far exceeding Nintendo’s $299 retail price. Several retailers even list the gaming device for $482 or more, according to the data.
“Amazon’s third-party marketplace allows people to do this,” Thinknum editor-in-chief Joshua Fruhlinger told Digital Trends.
The price gouging wasn’t limited to just one-off anonymous sellers who were listing the Switch and opportunistically jacking up the price, he added. Some of the predatory sellers had thousands of reviews or were listed as “Amazon bestsellers” or even Prime vendors.
The Switch is currently sold on out Nintendo’s official site, as well as other common electronics and game retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop.
Prices have held steady at $299 at these retailers, but they lack any supply. Listings on eBay appeared to average even higher, with many devices selling for $500 or more.
Amazon has seen a similar kind of price gouging before — though not to the same degree — when it came to sales of N95 face masks last December and January as coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, spread. In February, Amazon reportedly shut down over 1 million listings over price hiking in response to coronavirus fears, according to a report from ZDNet.
A spokesperson for Amazon told Digital Trends in an email, “Sellers set their own product prices in our store and we have policies to help ensure sellers are pricing their products competitively. We actively monitor our store and remove offers that violate our policies. We have implemented additional measures to keep prices low and our global teams are working 24/7 to monitor prices in our store.”
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.