Nintendo just announced a “Customer Appreciation Sale.” Thirty percent off games, DLC, accessories, amiibo, running September 12 through 26 — though it’s worth flagging up front that Nintendo’s own press release and GameSpot’s report say the 13th, while VGC says the 12th. Small discrepancy, but it’s the kind of thing that tells you these announcements are moving fast and even outlets covering it directly aren’t perfectly aligned. I’ll leave a link in the description so you can check the exact dates yourself before you buy anything.

Here’s the part that matters more than the dates, though. Nintendo didn’t just announce a sale. They told you why they’re running it. In their own words, the promotion is “made possible in part by tariff-related refunds.” And then, almost as an aside: “While Nintendo absorbed most tariff-related costs, the refunds helped make promotions like this one possible.”

Read that twice, because it’s doing a lot of quiet work. Nintendo is telling you, directly, that money it got back from the US government — money that exists because Nintendo raised your prices in the first place — is now funding a sale designed to get you to spend more. Not a refund. Not a price rollback. A sale.

To understand why that’s such a strange move, you need the timeline. All of it.

The price hikes

Last year, Nintendo raised prices on the original Switch hardware in the US. The Switch Lite went up thirty dollars. The standard Switch went up forty. The OLED went up fifty. This was widely attributed to the tariffs the Trump administration imposed as part of its “Liberation Day” trade policy — sweeping levies on goods from dozens of countries, including the components and manufacturing that go into a Switch.

Nintendo wasn’t hiding the reasoning. Tariffs went up, costs went up, so did the price you paid.

The tariffs get struck down

In February this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a large chunk of those tariffs were illegal. Not “should be renegotiated” — illegal. The federal government had collected around 165 billion dollars in tariffs under that policy, and roughly 100 billion of that has since been refunded to the more than a thousand companies — Nintendo among them — that sued to get it back.

To be precise here, because this is a point worth being precise about: that 100 billion figure is the total refunded across every company that sued, not a number specific to Nintendo. Nintendo has never disclosed exactly how much it personally got back. What we do know is what showed up in their earnings.

The earnings

In August, Nintendo reported quarterly profit up 53.5 percent, to about 147.4 billion yen — that’s roughly 694 million pounds — massively beating analyst forecasts of around 77.8 billion yen. And this happened despite overall revenue actually falling 10 percent year over year. Switch 2 sales stayed strong, games like Pokémon Pokopia performed steadily, but the topline was down. The profit spike came from somewhere else. Nintendo itself pointed to the tariff refund as the reason.

So: prices went up because of tariffs. The tariffs got ruled illegal. Nintendo got a chunk of that money back, and it showed up as a genuinely enormous profit beat. The obvious question at that point is simple — do the people who paid the higher, tariff-inflated prices get any of that back?

Nintendo’s answer

In July, two players filed a class action lawsuit arguing exactly that — that any tariff refund money should go back to the customers who effectively funded it through higher prices. Nintendo’s response wasn’t a quiet settlement. It was a motion to dismiss, and their legal argument deserves to be stated accurately, because it’s not actually a dumb argument, even if you disagree with it.

Nintendo’s lawyers said customers “received exactly what they bargained and paid for” — a console or game at a price both sides agreed to at the time of sale. Their filing argued that going back afterward and treating that price as retroactively unfair, just because Nintendo later got some money back, isn’t how commercial transactions work. You knew the price. You paid it. The transaction was complete.

That’s a real legal position, and to be fair to Nintendo, they weren’t alone in taking it. Sony and Microsoft, who received their own tariff refunds, made essentially the same argument — keep the money, no obligation to pass it back. Reporting characterized their position as, roughly, “that’s just how capitalism works.”

And not every company landed there. Panic, the small studio behind the Playdate handheld, took the opposite approach — refunding roughly twelve dollars per customer who’d paid the tariff-inflated price. Their founder, Cabel Sasser, put it simply: it wasn’t their money to keep. Walmart and Home Depot went a third route — not direct refunds, but general price reductions across their catalogues, funded in part by their own refunds.

So there’s a real spectrum of how companies handled this. Full refund. General price cuts. Nothing at all. Nintendo sits at the “nothing at all” end — right up until this month, when they announced a sale and specifically credited the tariff refund as part of what made it possible.

Why this isn’t new

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting, because Nintendo has been in this exact rhetorical position before — thirty-five years ago, almost to the letter.

In 1991, Nintendo of America settled a price-fixing case with the FTC and the attorneys general of New York and Maryland. The allegation, in Robert Abrams’ own words as New York AG, was that Nintendo — despite holding an 80 percent share of the market — pressured retailers into keeping the price of the base console fixed at $99.99, threatening to cut off supply to any retailer who discounted it by even six cents.

Nintendo denied the price-fixing allegations. They settled anyway, “to get the matter behind us.” The settlement: $5 coupons toward Nintendo game cartridges, available to anyone who’d bought a system between June 1988 and December 1990, plus $25 million in redemption certificates overall, plus payments to the states for enforcement costs.

The parallel isn’t that the facts are the same — this isn’t price-fixing, and nobody’s alleging illegal conduct in 2026 the way the FTC alleged it in 1991. The parallel is the pattern. A large sum of money that, by any plain reading, belongs at least partly to the customers who generated it. And a company that, when the moment comes to give it back, converts that obligation into a promotional event instead — coupons then, a “Customer Appreciation Sale” now. Something that looks generous on the surface, gets Nintendo positive headlines, and still requires you to spend money to see any benefit.

Where this leaves things

Worth being clear about what’s confirmed and what isn’t. Confirmed: the price hikes happened, the tariffs were ruled illegal, Nintendo’s profits jumped and the company attributed part of that to tariff refunds, the class action lawsuit is real and ongoing, and Nintendo explicitly tied the new sale to those refunds in their own press statement. Less clear: the exact size of Nintendo’s individual refund, and how the ongoing lawsuit will actually resolve — that’s still in the courts, and there’s a fresh wrinkle where 25 states are now suing the Trump administration over a second round of tariffs announced in July, which could open the door to another refund cycle down the line. One to watch, not something to treat as settled.

Nintendo’s not doing anything illegal here. Their legal argument for keeping the money is coherent, even if you don’t find it satisfying. But it’s hard not to notice that a company willing to spend $30 million settling a price-fixing case in 1991 rather than admit wrongdoing is the same company, in 2026, choosing a sale over a refund — again betting that a good headline costs less than actually giving the money back.