Buy Pikmin 4 for $40 Now and Pay $10 Later, Not $70 in November

Walmart has Pikmin 4 on Switch for $39.88 as a digital copy, more than $20 under the usual $60. The Switch 2 Edition arrives on 12 November with better graphics, a new mode called Dandori Academy and voice commands for Oatchi, the dog. If you own the game, the upgrade pack is $9.99. If you wait and buy the Switch 2 Edition outright, it is $69.99.

The maths is the whole story here, so let me do it. $39.88 now plus $9.99 in November is $49.87. Buying the finished thing on 12 November is $69.99. That is $20 saved for the inconvenience of owning the game three weeks early, which is not an inconvenience.

That is what I would do. Not because playing it early matters, but because $20 is $20 and the upgrade path is already priced and dated by Nintendo. This is the rare case where buying the old version is not a gamble: the publisher has told you what the bridge costs. Most of the time, waiting is the right call on anything new. Here waiting costs money.

One caution that applies to every digital deal: the $39.88 is a store price on a given day, not a list price. Check it before you buy, and if it has gone back to $60 then the whole calculation changes and you are better off waiting for November.

About the dog taking voice commands. Nine of them, through the microphone built into the Switch 2. Noa has the console and plays this kind of game properly, so I am leaving that judgement to her rather than guessing from a feature list. What I can say from where I sit is that voice control has a long history of sounding better in an announcement than it feels on a sofa at eleven at night, and that none of it changes the arithmetic above.