The is reportedly being sold at a low wholesale price to Japanese retail stores. This is one of several moves that Nintendo has taken to ensure that the Nintendo Switch 2 will have a successful domestic launch.

As the birthplace of Nintendo and many of the world’s other largest video game companies, Japan holds a special place in the wider gaming industry. The original Switch was hugely successful in Japan and it looks like Nintendo is trying to replicate that popularity with its successor console.

According to a recent article from Bloomberg, Nintendo is making the wholesale price of the Switch 2 relatively low for Japanese retailers so that stores will make more profit by selling the system. Typically, there’s about a 2% gross margin on game consoles, but stores will reportedly make a 5% gross on each Switch 2 sale. This provides extra incentive for major Japanese retailers to advertise the console more heavily in their brick-and-mortar stores.

In most regions of the world, the Switch 2 will retail at around $450 USD. There will be a cheaper Switch 2 model sold in Japan, however, with the caveat that it will be region-locked and only support Japanese language accounts. The Japan-exclusive version of the console will sell for ¥49,980, which when converted is closer to $350. This is yet another piece of evidence that Nintendo is going out of its way to create favorable conditions for the Switch 2’s release in its native country.

Video game systems are not highly profitable products, either for the retail stores or for the console manufacturers themselves. Instead, they are sold at a low margin to create as large of an install base as possible. That way, future software offerings and peripherals will have a bigger pool of customers to market to. The Switch 1 had a notoriously large install base, which allowed for a diverse range of games to do well on the system.

Many of Nintendo’s long-running series achieved a much greater level of success on the Switch than they did on any previous console. Titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate are all the highest-selling games in their respective franchises. It’s not just big-name series that got a boost on Switch, though. The system’s healthy customer base enabled some relatively niche Nintendo IPs to break through and receive an unprecedented amount of mainstream attention. Metroid Dread, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Pikmin 4 created many new fans in franchises that had often been seen as cult classics before this console generation.