I disagree that Nintendo hasn't been raising the price of the Switch, they're just smart enough to avoid publicizing a price hike.
When the Switch launched 5 years ago, it had an MSRP of $299. Their most recent release was this week was the Splatoon 3 special edition OLED switch, which has an MSRP of $359. That's 20% more expensive than launch, and even $10 more than a standard OLED switch. The OLED switch, itself, was always a stealth price hike hidden by an extremely minor upgrade.
Minor late-gen hardware refreshes used to be at the same or cheaper price than the standard console - and the standard console usually had already gotten a price drop or two by that point. It just makes sense that old tech becomes less valuable as the hardware goes obsolete.
Imagine if instead of releasing a Galaxy S22 this year, Samsung just re-released a special color Galaxy S8 plus, at $10 over it's original launch price.
The phone market wouldn't accept that, so why should gamers?
I know gamers willingly spend obscene amounts of money on valueless subscriptions, broken games, scams, artless products, exploitative skinner boxes, infinitely copyable products, gambling, 'to win', FIFA, and imaginary doll clothes.... But they still deserve to have some modern hardware. If we are to believe it's so expensive to box and ship a product in "these trying times" then at least put something decent in the box. The days of everybody panic buying any trash leftover on the shelves are over.
These companies have had nearly 3 years to figure out their supply chain issues. At what point do the stockholders get to start blaming the out-of-control costs of doing business on incompetent management?
How much more will we take until we just find a better hobby?
Money doesn't disappear when you spend it. The only thing that can be certain is that somebody is getting extremely rich off of all this. I want to know who to blame.