Nintendo Sale 2026: 30% Off Switch Games and eShop Deals
- The sale is called the Customer Appreciation Sale and it ends 26 September 2026 at 8:59pm PT — 11:59pm ET, 04:59 UK time on the 27th. That is Nintendo’s own stated cut-off, not a rounded date.
- It is a flat 30%, not ‘up to 30%’. Nintendo labels 139 of the 141 items at exactly −30%, and the two exceptions — a hat and an amiibo — are cut deeper, not shallower.
- 🔴 There are no Nintendo Switch 2 games in it. All 80 discounted games are Switch 1 titles. We confirmed this with Nintendo’s own filters, twice, in both directions.
- The 141 items break down as 80 games, 55 hardware and 6 merchandise — and only the games carry a countdown. Nintendo publishes no end date on the hardware tiles.
- A second, unrelated sale is running alongside it: six Crash Bandicoot titles at 70% off, ending earlier, on 20 September.
- Nintendo says the sale is ‘made possible in part by tariff-related refunds’. It is one of the few times a company has said that out loud.
- Nintendo received about $300 million in tariff refunds and is facing a proposed class action from customers who say they should get some of it back. The sale is not a refund.
Nintendo is running a 30% off sale on its own games, and it ends on 26 September at 8:59pm Pacific.
It is called the Customer Appreciation Sale, it is unusually broad, and Nintendo has said out loud what is paying for it: tariff refunds. Here is what is actually in it — and the one thing it does not contain.
The deadline, precisely
| Sale | Customer Appreciation Sale |
| Discount | A flat 30% on almost everything in it |
| Ends | 26 September 2026, 8:59pm PT |
| 11:59pm ET · 04:59 UK on the 27th | |
| Where | Nintendo eShop, Nintendo Store, participating retailers |
| Region | United States only |
The time matters more than the date. Nintendo’s own banner on the sale page reads “sale ends 9/26 at 8:59 p.m. PT”, and its eShop data field for the discounted titles carries 27 September — the same moment, written in UTC. A round-up that tells you “ends 26 September” is right; one that tells you to buy “by the 27th” is a day out.
⚠️ Coverage disagrees about the start date. Nintendo’s release says the sale runs “from September 12 through September 26”. Tom’s Hardware says 13 to 26; Engadget says midnight ET on the 13th. It is live now either way, so we have not tried to resolve it.
What is actually in it
141 items. We counted them off Nintendo’s own filters.
| Category | Items | Countdown shown? |
|---|---|---|
| Games | 80 | Yes — “Sale ends: 13 days” |
| Hardware | 55 | No |
| Merchandise | 6 | No |
| Total | 141 |
✅ It is a flat 30%, not “up to 30%”. Nintendo labels 139 of the 141 items at −30%, and we checked the arithmetic on a sample of 31 of them: 29 come out at exactly 30.00%, and the other two are fractionally over because the sale price is rounded to the cent. The Switch 2 Camera at $37.99 from $54.99 is really 30.9%; Nintendo’s tile floors it to −30%.
The two items labelled differently are cut deeper, not shallower. A Mario Kart slouch hat is $16.44 from $24.99 (34%) and a Kirby amiibo is $27.99 from $44.99 (37%). Those are not rounding — 30% off would be $17.49 and $31.49 — and Nintendo does not say why they are different.
Practically: assume 30% on everything and you will be right or slightly pleased. There is no hidden deeper tier to hunt for.
🔴 Only the games carry a clock. Every one of the 80 games shows a countdown; not one of the 55 hardware items or 6 merchandise items does. Nintendo’s banner says the sale ends on the 26th and its wording covers “games and more”, so the hardware presumably ends with it — but Nintendo does not print that on the tiles, and we are not going to state a deadline the retailer has not.
The thing this sale does not have
🔴 There are no Nintendo Switch 2 games in it. Not one.
All 80 discounted games are Nintendo Switch titles. This is the single most useful fact on the page if you own a Switch 2 and came here expecting to save money on its library.
We checked it in both directions, because a claim like this is easy to get backwards:
| Query | Result |
|---|---|
| Category = Games | Platform filter shows “Nintendo Switch 80” — the Switch 2 option disappears entirely |
| Platform = Nintendo Switch 2 | Category filter collapses to “Hardware 42” — Games and Merchandise both vanish |
So the 42 Switch 2 items in this sale are all hardware: the Switch 2 Camera at $37.99 from $54.99, the Virtual Boy accessory at $69.99 from $99.99, cables and adapters.
Nintendo’s own wording is precise about this, and it is where most coverage slips. The press release offers savings “on dozens of Nintendo Switch games” and pictures you “revisiting an adventure on your Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2 system”. Switch 2 plays Switch games. That is a sentence about backward compatibility, not about Switch 2 titles being discounted — and it is doing a lot of quiet work.
The Switch 2 itself is $499.99 on Nintendo’s store today, undiscounted.
The games worth the most
Every game in this sale is from Nintendo’s own catalogue, which is why Nintendo calls it “one of our largest promotions ever”.
The biggest dollar savings:
| Title | Was | Now | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fire Emblem Engage Bundle (Game + Expansion Pass) | $89.98 | $62.98 | $27.00 |
| Xenoblade Chronicles 3 + Expansion Pass | $89.98 | $62.98 | $27.00 |
| Xenoblade Chronicles 2 + Expansion Pass | $89.98 | $62.98 | $27.00 |
| Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Bundle (Game + Booster Course Pass) | $84.98 | $59.48 | $25.50 |
| Animal Crossing: New Horizons Bundle (Game + DLC) | $84.98 | $59.48 | $25.50 |
| Splatoon 3 Bundle (Game + Expansion Pass) | $84.98 | $59.48 | $25.50 |
| Breath of the Wild + Expansion Pass Bundle | $79.98 | $55.98 | $24.00 |
| The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom | $69.99 | $48.99 | $21.00 |
| Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 | $69.99 | $48.99 | $21.00 |
The $59.99 tier — most of the big first-party catalogue — is $41.99. That covers Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Super Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 4, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Metroid Dread, Splatoon 3, Echoes of Wisdom, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, Astral Chain, Bayonetta 3 and around thirty more.
And the cheap end is genuinely cheap:
| Title | Was | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Kirby’s Dream Buffet | $14.99 | $10.49 |
| Kirby Fighters 2 | $19.99 | $13.99 |
| Splatoon 3: Expansion Pass | $24.99 | $17.49 |
| Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain | $29.99 | $20.99 |
| Metroid Prime Remastered | $39.99 | $27.99 |
| Nintendo Switch Sports | $39.99 | $27.99 |
⚠️ Metroid Prime 4: Beyond at $41.99 is the one to notice on timing — it released in December 2025, which is young for a Nintendo first-party title to be cut by nearly a third.
The other sale, which ends sooner
Running alongside it is a completely separate Crash Bandicoot sale at 70% off — and it finishes first.
| Title | Was | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time | $39.99 | $11.99 |
| Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy | $39.99 | $11.99 |
| Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled | $39.99 | $11.99 |
| Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled — Nitros Oxide Edition | $59.99 | $17.99 |
| Crash Bandicoot — Quadrilogy Bundle | $69.99 | $20.99 |
| Crash Bandicoot — Crashiversary Bundle | $99.99 | $29.99 |
🔴 This one ends on 20 September, six days before the other. Nintendo’s tiles showed “Sale ends: 7 days” when we read them on the 13th, and its data field reads 2026-09-20 — but unlike the Customer Appreciation Sale, no exact cut-off time is published for it. If you want these, treat the 19th as the safe day.
It is a deeper discount on a smaller, older catalogue. Six SKUs, all Activision, all Switch 1, none of them new. That is the opposite shape to the Nintendo sale and worth keeping straight: two different sales, two different clocks, on the same storefront.
Hardware and amiibo
55 hardware items are 30% off, which is the part most “eShop deals” write-ups miss entirely because it is not on the eShop.
| Item | Was | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo | $109.99 | $76.99 |
| Virtual Boy for Switch 2 / Switch | $99.99 | $69.99 |
| Joy-Con (L)/(R) pairs | $89.99 | $62.99 |
| Nintendo Switch Pro Controller | $79.99 | $55.99 |
| Nintendo Switch 2 Camera | $54.99 | $37.99 |
| Most amiibo | $29.99 | $20.99 |
| Virtual Boy (Cardboard Model) | $24.99 | $17.49 |
⚠️ Stock is a separate question from price. The SNES Controller was listed at $24.49 from $34.99 and marked sold out when we looked. A 30% discount on something nobody can buy is not a deal, and these are physical goods with finite stock rather than digital licences.
Why this sale exists
Nintendo told us, which is the unusual part.
Its announcement, dated 10 September, says in full:
“The Customer Appreciation Sale is our way of saying thank you to Nintendo players for their continued support and is made possible in part by tariff-related refunds. While Nintendo absorbed most tariff-related costs, the refunds helped make promotions like this one possible.”
Companies almost never attribute a promotion to a specific windfall on the record. This one did.
The background, from reporting rather than from us: Nintendo of America received around $300 million in tariff refunds, a figure both Tom’s Hardware and Engadget attribute to a 2026 Nintendo earnings document. Both also report that the Supreme Court found large parts of the tariffs unlawful. Tom’s Hardware adds that over $166 billion was due back to American businesses and that $100 billion had been paid out by the end of July — figures we have seen in that one outlet only, and label accordingly.
🔴 Nintendo is facing a proposed class action over exactly this. Customers argue the company is made whole twice — once through the higher prices they paid, and again through the refunds. Nintendo has moved to dismiss, arguing it has no legal obligation to return the money. Sony faces a similar suit. Our sources disagree on which month the motion was filed, so we do not date it.
One company did it differently. Panic, which makes the Playdate handheld, refunded tariff charges to its customers directly in August. Both Tom’s Hardware and Engadget note it. It is the clearest available comparison, and it is why “a sale” and “a refund” are being argued about as different things.
This page takes no position on the lawsuit and makes no prediction about how it ends. What is verifiable is the sequence: prices went up, refunds came back, and what customers are being offered is a fortnight of 30% off rather than money.
What this page will not tell you
- Whether to wait. Nobody knows what any of these titles will cost in December. There is no forecast here.
- Whether a retailer beats Nintendo. Nintendo’s own release says offers “may vary by retailer and sales channel”. We checked Nintendo’s store, not Best Buy’s or Walmart’s, and we are not going to imply otherwise.
- Anything about Nintendo’s share price. The prices on this page are the price of games.
The bottom line
If you own a Switch 1 and there is a first-party game you have been putting off, this is the fortnight. A flat 30% across Nintendo’s own catalogue is rare, Nintendo itself calls it one of its largest promotions ever, and the clock runs out at 8:59pm Pacific on 26 September.
If you own a Switch 2 and came for its games, there is nothing here. The 42 Switch 2 items in this sale are cameras, cables and a Virtual Boy. Every discounted game is from the previous generation — which you can play, but which is not what the headlines are promising.
And if you want the Crash games, you have until the 20th, not the 26th.
All prices were read from Nintendo’s own US storefront on 13 September 2026 and every one of them expires on the 26th. Item counts come from Nintendo’s own filter panel. The tariff refund figures are attributed to the outlets that reported them, not verified by us. No affiliate links, and no payment was received for any link on this page.