Switch 2 preorders went live online at 12:01 a.m. ET and were every bit the mess some fans feared: pages timing out, error messages that weren’t real, and email cancelations being received just moments after it seemed like orders had gone through. There must be a better way to do these. Not in time for the Switch 2 launch, unfortunately.
Walmart, Target, and Best Buy had each announced plans to begin selling Switch 2 preorders at midnight on April 24, just a month and change before the June 5 launch of the $450 console. Fans eagerly refreshed the landing pages for Nintendo’s hotly anticipated console, including its $500 Mario Kart World bundle. Things immediately went off the rails.
Walmart shoved everyone into an invisible queue with the ominous and equally vague warning: “This deal is almost gone. This item is likely to sell out, but you can stay in line and we’ll let you know if any are available when it’s your turn.” No information about where exactly in line people were or how they’d be notified if their turn to preorder arose. A prompt to verify that you were human and not a scalper bot required holding down the cursor to fill up a meter only for the page to get caught in an endless refresh loop.
Then there was Best Buy. The Geek Squad didn’t even put Switch 2 preorders live at midnight as previously promised. They pages simply said “coming soon.” Were they already sold out? Broken? Who knew. So everyone went to Target instead which made it easy to add a Switch 2 preorder to a shopping cart and appear to check out. That’s when the website started breaking. It told fans to check for errors in their cart but didn’t list any.
Clicking the order button just refreshed the page, except that some people randomly started getting notifications that that their preorder had been secured only for follow-up emails moments later telling them that it had been canceled. Some people, including yours truly, managed to eventually get a preorder that appeared to stick just by continuously clicking the order button despite nothing actually changing on the web page.
Best Buy preorders did eventually go live for the Switch 2 at 12:29 a.m. ET (thanks Wario64) and shoppers there were thrown into a digital queue that, for me at least, hasn’t updated in over 25 minutes. “You’re in line! Wait times can take up to a few minutes or longer, based on product demand. Next we’ll verify your account and check available inventory.” Cool!
It comes as no surprise that Switch 2 preorders are in high demand. Nintendo apologized on Wednesday for not having enough stock to fulfill all of the desired preorders through its My Nintendo lottery in Japan after the more than 2.2 million requests the company received “exceeded” its expectations. Some analysts are now predicting the company could sell an unprecedented 20 million units in the Switch 2’s first year, if the Mario maker could somehow manage to manufacture that many.
But there’s no reason the process has to be such a mess. It’s 2025 and over five years after the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S preordering debacles, not much has changed. Online retailer storefronts are still held together by duct tape with no improvements around the most basic things like telling people ahead of time exactly how the online preorder shopping experience will unfold or queuing people to sort them all out instead of having millions of ISPs suddenly bum rush your servers at midnight.
Of course, there will always be winners and losers in the race to snag the hot new thing before everyone else, and it remains to be seen just how many people who wanted to secure a Switch 2 early came up empty tonight. GameStop’s preorders don’t go live until 11:00 a.m. ET on April 24, with separate, in-person inventory gated behind individual store openings. Other online retailers will possibly release additional waves of preorder inventory in the weeks ahead as well, and those looking to buy direct from Nintendo still have until May 8 to find out if they were selected or not.
But for now it’s safe to say that Switch 2 preorders have, so far at least, gone about as badly as anyone could have predicted. I’m beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that Nintendo’s new console might end up being pretty hard to get, and may potentially stay that way through the end-of-year holiday rush. And it hasn’t even officially revealed a new 3D Mario or Zelda yet.
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