The hunt for Switch 2 began in chaos: pre-orders turned into online hell

As soon as online pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch 2 started, the worst fears of fans instantly came true. Pages were freezing, non-existent error messages appeared, and cancellation emails arrived just moments after it seemed like everything went well.

Here's What We Know

Walmart, Target, and Best Buy announced in advance that they would start accepting pre-orders for Switch 2 at midnight on 24 April, just a month before the console's official launch at $450 (and a bundle with Mario Kart World for $500). Fans were eagerly updating the pages of the anticipated new product from Nintendo, but everything went wrong right away.

Walmart threw everyone into an invisible queue with an alarming yet vague warning: "This offer is almost over. This item is likely to sell out, but you can stay in line and we'll let you know if anything is available when it's your turn." No information about where people are in the queue and how they will be notified when the opportunity to pre-order becomes available. A request for confirmation that you were a human and not a bot required you to hold down the cursor to fill in the scale, after which the page simply got stuck in an endless refresh cycle.

Then there was Best Buy. "The pages just had the words 'coming soon' on them. Is it already sold out? Has it sold out? Who knows? So we all rushed to Target, where we could easily add the Switch 2 to the basket and proceed to checkout. That's when the website started to crash. It was telling fans to check their cart for errors, but it wasn't showing any errors.

Clicking on the "order" button simply refreshed the page, except that some people accidentally started receiving notifications of successful pre-orders, and then a moment later they received cancellation emails. Some people eventually managed to "break through" and get a pre-order that seemed to work by just continuously clicking the "order" button, even though nothing changed on the website.

Pre-orders at Best Buy did work, and customers were thrown into a digital queue.

It is not surprising that the demand for Switch 2 pre-orders is so high. On 23 April, Nintendo apologised for not having enough goods to satisfy everyone who participated in the My Nintendo lottery in Japan, after more than 2.2 million requests "exceeded" the company's expectations. Some analysts are now predicting that the company could sell an unprecedented 20 million units in the first year of the Switch 2, if the manufacturer could somehow produce that many.

But there's no reason why this process has to be so chaotic. It's 2025, and more than five years after the infamous PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S pre-orders, but not much has changed. Online storefronts are still held together by duct tape, with no improvement in the simplest of things like letting people know in advance how the online pre-order process will work, or organising a queue instead of millions of ISPs simultaneously attacking your servers at midnight.

Of course, there will always be winners and losers in the race for the coveted new product, and it remains to be seen how many people who wanted to get their hands on the Switch 2 as early as possible were left with nothing last night. Pre-orders at GameStop will start at a later date, and some stock for in-person purchase will only be available once stores open. Other online retailers may release additional waves of pre-orders in the coming weeks, and those who want to purchase the console directly from Nintendo have until May 8 to find out if they have been selected.

But for now, it's safe to say that pre-orders for the Switch 2 have, at least for the moment, gone as badly as anyone could have predicted. The new Nintendo console is likely to be quite difficult to get, and this situation may persist until the end of the year, before the holiday rush. And they haven't even officially announced a new 3D Mario or Zelda yet.

Source: Kotaku