Imagine you were up at midnight to pre-order the Switch 2. You waited months for the official launch day. Then you waited again in line at midnight to be one of the first to pick it up and play the new Nintendo hardware. But as you open it, the long-awaited moment of joy turns to horror as you find that someone stapled the receipt for the Switch 2 to the box and now you have holes in the screen. That’s what happened to some unlucky GameStop customers last night in a bizarre turn of events that raises questions about why Nintendo boxed the console the way it did.
A thread went viral on the GameStop subreddit last night when someone shared pictures of a receipt stapled to their Switch 2 box that went through the cardboard and damaged their console. “Midnight release went bad for me,” it read. The pictures showed the receipt stapled to the front of the box, the puncture holes it left in both the cardboard and the plastic wrap, and the ensuing dents in the Switch 2's screen.
The GameStop in question was reportedly located in Staten Island, New York. Like at most of the company’s stores, the midnight launch brought out tons of Nintendo fans excited to be some of the first in the world to go hands-on with the new hardware. It’s unclear if the stapling was being done by everyone at the store or just one person, and how many people were ultimately affected. Other users who were at the event shared similar horror stories, though.
“GameStop stapled the receipt for me and my friends Switch 2s to the box, FML,” Oadhan Lynch posted on X. “Genuinely insane now I’m gonna have to wait 3 months for the restock. And yes we were there for the midnight release so I bet everyone in this line is gonna have this same issue.” Another customer from the same location who faced a similar situation commiserated with them in the comments.
While stapling anything to a video game console box is unnecessary and lowkey unhinged, anyone working a console midnight launch at GameStop is probably part-time and making barely $15 an hour, especially as store closures and high turnover have continued to hollow out more seasoned staff. For many employees across the company at thousands of locations, this was probably the first console launch they’d ever worked through. It was certainly the biggest.
Nintendo, on the other hand, has experience not just with launching new consoles but boxing and shipping hundreds of millions of them all around the world. So it should be noted that it’s equally wild that the company known for its meticulous attention to detail would box the Switch 2 with the screen facing up and only covered by 1.5mm of light cardboard.
I know because I measured. I was surprised by just how exposed the Switch 2 seemed after I unboxed mine last night. The packaging is so thin that even the box falling from a certain height onto the wrong object might be equally damaging. Others were kind of horrified, too. “You’re going to hear about a few damaged screens in the coming days,” one new Switch 2 owner predicted on X. “They are at risk just being stacked in shipping.”
Maybe not. Maybe Nintendo actually did testing on the box layout and found that, for structural reasons not obvious to the naked eye, the Switch 2 remains safe from just about anything that might normally happen to it during transit, except, clearly, someone taking a stapler to it. The consoles can be replaced but the wait will be a pain for those who thought they’d finally gotten their hands on a console that would last them for another eight years. “Totally killed the excitement of the night,” wrote Oadhan Lynch.
It’s worth noting that at least some Switch 2 consoles ordered directly from Nintendo came packaged in a second, much sturdier outer box, as contributing editor John Walker discovered when his arrived earlier today. Nintendo did not immediately respond to request for comment. GameStop told Kotaku in an email, “We are currently investigating this matter. We will make the customer whole if there was damage.”
Update 6/5/2025 12:42 p.m. ET: A customer who was impacted by the stapling issue says they were told that replacement units are on there way from a neighboring store. How did the staples become a thing to begin with? According to what they were told, the store’s air conditioner was broken and it had gotten hot enough in the store that the receipts weren’t staying taped to the boxes. To avoid mixed up paper work they were stapled on instead.
Update 6/6/2025 9:25 a.m. ET: Wired’s Megan Farokhmanesh reports that some affected by the staple issue were “made whole again” with fresh Switch 2 consoles later that same day.
Update 6/5/2025 12:42 p.m. ET: Added a statement from GameStop.
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