Many of the tariffs imposed on foreign nations by the United States government in 2025 have been deemed unconstitutional. Today, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a wide collection of plaintiffs who had sued the Trump administration for its imposition of tariffs under International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The President claimed the law gave him authority to impose tariffs on foreign countries. The courts repeatedly disagreed.
Today’s ruling triggers an explosive range of questions for businesses across the United States and the globe, but the video game industry will be watching to see if the removal of these tariffs impacts the pricing of video game hardware. In 2025, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all raised prices on official hardware due to “economic conditions.” Those conditions only came into being after “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, when President Trump unveiled sky-high tariffs on goods made overseas.
With the majority of video game manufacturing taking place in China, which faced particularly stiff tariffs, the manufacturers of video game consoles faced the possibility of economic damage to their bottom line. Of the three companies, only Nintendo seemed immediately prepared to weather the storm, successfully launching the Nintendo Switch 2 after moving much of US-bound manufacturing to Vietnam over the last half-decade (Vietnam faced far lower tariffs than those imposed on China).
President Trump denounced the decision in a press conference following the ruling. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution. It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”
He did not specify what “foreign interests” or political movement he was referring to. Shortly thereafter, he announced a new 10 percent tariff under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That law allows the president to set tariffs of up to 15 percent for approximately five months.
Console hardware pricing still faces AI-driven shortages
Whatever relief video game hardware manufacturers feel with today’s news is likely to fade fast given the latest challenge to electronic pricing: shortages of RAM and hard drives driven by spending on AI data centers.
That shortage was accelerated by ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s December 2025 deal with Samsung where it secured 40 percent of the world’s DRAM manufacturing output. DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips are used for memory allocation in all forms of computing hardware. The immediately shortage drove up prices for consumer RAM sticks by up to 171 percent.
The shortage has already caught Steam Deck and Steam Machine developer Valve by surprise, delaying the launch of its new SteamOS-based hardware and driving shortages of the Steam Deck OLED.
Meanwhile Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa warned investors on a recent call that the shortage “may put pressure on profitability.”
Game Developer has reached out to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo for comment on this story and will update it when we receive a response.
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