"Are you going to pick food, or are you going to pick a new game?": Analyst says "folks want to be optimistic" about Switch 2 and GTA 6 boosting the industry, but tariffs and cost of living loom

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?"

A common refrain in the games industry last year was: "Survive 2024." After post-covid downturns, many developers hoped to simply get through the year, get to the Switch 2, get to GTA 6, let them bring a whole bunch of people and spending and investment and opportunity back to the industry, and then reassess. Piscatella said he'd heard the same from many publishers and retailers. In the US, these new tariffs have complicated those hopes a fair bit.

Today, there's a lot of "contingency planning, trying to read the tea leaves," Piscatella says, and "trying to figure out the best way to move forward when the layout of the tariffs has been a little bit chaotic and hard to predict, to say the least. People are just kind of waiting and seeing what's happening and trying to plan accordingly, but hopeful that, with Switch 2, with GTA 6, when it comes to the tariffs, the increased presence of digital – which wouldn't be subject to those tariffs, at least not at this stage – lessens those kinds of burns a little bit. But everyone's still nervous, right?"

Piscatella said just last December that the combo of GTA 6 and Nintendo Switch 2 is almost unprecedented in the games industry's history, and as interesting as these mega-releases are, at this point I selfishly find myself hoping to one day speak to him during quite precedented times.

These tariffs have affected much more than just games, of course, and resulting economic knock-on effects can directly impact game spending as well if they reach daily essentials.

Piscatella dismisses the old theory that games are especially resistant to inflation or other financial hardships – "I don't think that's right at all, I don't think the data even supports that idea," he says – and stresses that when life gets more costly, games can face pressure just like any other non-essential.

"If things like groceries get a lot more expensive, or other everyday, essential categories get more expensive, then consumers are really going to have to pick and choose," he says. "And you know, are you going to pick food, or are you going to pick a new game? For most people, they'll pick the food. But you know, we have some dedicated players that could pick a game and eat Top Ramen. Who the hell knows? But anyways, long-winded answer, I think everyone's just kind of waiting and seeing and trying to prepare for what may come next."

Even if people do choose to game through a recession, or shrinkflation, or what-have-you, Piscatella says we can still see "more people kind of shifting to free-to-play, to easily accessible products, to kind of offset what they're experiencing in other parts of their world."

Piscatella regularly emphasizes the power of today's biggest live service games – the Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox of the world – being "the majority of what the mass market plays." As ever, "there's immense pressure on the market. And if you throw in things like a recession or higher prices on groceries and all this other stuff, I think it gets nasty."

"People talk about the competition thing and what's the biggest competition for Switch 2," he adds. "And I don't know, I think the biggest competition for Switch 2 is going to be Switch 2 supply and the tariffs, but we'll see what happens."

Former Rockstar dev says we've seen enough GTA 6 trailers: "The element of surprise is going to make the release only bigger as an event."