Nintendo could be coming to India with a console that turns ten next year
Here’s a sentence that makes no sense and yet might actually be true: Nintendo is planning to launch the Switch 1 in India. Not the Switch 2. The original. The console that came out in 2017. The one that’s been available grey, modded, and second-hand in the market for the better part of a decade.According to sources who spoke to the DayZero podcast under anonymity, a February or March 2027 window is being targeted, with Redington handling distribution on the ground. The price point being floated is around Rs 20,000. First-party titles are part of the plan too—Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart are the early guesses. Pricing on software? Nobody knows yet.
The House of Mario is run by a very small India team
The people making these decisions aren’t a full-blown regional office. DayZero’s sources describe Nintendo’s India operation as three or four Japanese executives and one Indian who moved to Tokyo and is running things alongside them. It’s a small team for a big market, and what they’ve landed on is an official launch for a console people have already started to feel nostalgic about.To understand why the timing feels off, consider this: the Switch 2 has already sold nearly 20 million units globally in its first fiscal year, per Nintendo’s own financial results. It isn’t part of the India conversation yet. Not officially, anyway. Rishi Alwani, who covers the gaming industry closely through his 0451 newsletter, has tracked exactly how that’s played out—grey market stock of the Switch 2 is already moving in India at Rs 58,000 to Rs 65,000.If Nintendo does show up, here’s the fine printSwitch consoles are already floating around unofficial channels. The original Switch is so old it’s barely being resold anymore—a used one goes for Rs 20,000–25,000 on a good day. The Lite caps out at around Rs 20,000. The OLED sits at Rs 35,000. So Nintendo’s official India entry lands you a brand new base Switch 1 at roughly the same price as a second-hand original, one that’s also available grey, modded, and sometimes cheaper with a stack of games thrown in. It isn’t a terrible deal, exactly. It just isn’t a particularly exciting one either.There’s also no Indian eShop confirmed, no Switch Online gift cards at retail, and a real possibility of region locking given what Nintendo did in China with Tencent. The distributor of choice, Redington, has had a complicated relationship with gaming retail in India—Alwani’s 0451 newsletter notes that Redington and gaming retail have a history together in India, and it isn’t one that most store owners bring up fondly—Xbox availability, or the lack of it, tells that story well enough.None of this is to say the launch won’t matter. An official Nintendo presence means shelf space, visibility, and the kind of awareness that the grey market quietly never built. The person walking into a brick-and-mortar electronics store today doesn’t necessarily know there’s a gaming console besides PlayStation worth considering. That changes when there’s a box on the shelf with a price tag on it.But Nintendo’s biggest competition in India at this point isn’t PlayStation. It’s its own hardware, already here, already sold, already in people’s hands. For Rs 20,000, it would be nice if they at least showed up with a 10th anniversary special edition. Something to make the occasion feel intentional rather than incidental.
