Splatoon Raiders finally has a release date: Thursday, July 23, exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2. Nintendo locked it in during a roughly 15-minute Direct on June 30, along with the price ($59.99), co-op for up to four players, and a trio of Deep Cut amiibo that — no joke — costs more than the game itself.
If you’ve been wondering whether this spin-off is a real Splatoon game or a side experiment, the Direct pretty much answered that. Here’s everything worth knowing before July 23.
The key details: date, price, and pre-orders
Splatoon Raiders launches July 23, 2026, only on Switch 2 — there’s no version for the original Switch. It’s priced at $59.99 (£49.99 in the UK), and pre-orders are already live; Amazon currently lists it at $49.94, according to GamesRadar’s pre-order roundup. That $59.99 sticker is worth pausing on, too: with first-party Switch 2 games typically landing at $69.99 or $79.99, Nintendo is deliberately pricing this one below its own flagships.
You can play the whole thing solo or with up to three other players, online or over local wireless. And per Nintendo Life, there are three difficulty modes: Tourist for casual players, Raider as the standard experience, and Survivalist for series veterans who want to sweat.
🛒 Pre-order Splatoon Raiders on Amazon
What Splatoon Raiders actually is
Raiders is the first spin-off in the series’ history and its fourth installment overall. Instead of the turf-war PvP the franchise is famous for, this is a single-player-focused, co-op-friendly PvE adventure. You play “the Mechanic,” crash-landed on the mysterious Spirhalite Islands alongside the idol trio Deep Cut, hunting treasure and the crystal-like Spirhalite the islands are named after. The enemies, fittingly, are Salmonids — and yes, there’s base-building between raids.
Nintendo first announced the game back in June 2025 through the Nintendo Today! app, then sat on the release date until April. The June 30 Direct was the first real deep dive into how it plays.
The new mechanics change the formula
This plays differently from mainline Splatoon. Gadgets — your special tools — run on cooldown timers instead of ink, and you can equip two at once. They’re tied to Tanks, which come in three flavors: Speed, Power, and Tactical. Raids level you up and hand out skill points to spend on HP, damage, or gadget upgrades — closer to an action-RPG loop than anything the series has done before.
You also get a Bot Buddy, a drone companion that fights with ink, follows you around, launches you into the air, drills through ore, and sniffs out treasure. Each one packs its own “Showstopper” special attack.
A few quality-of-life notes from the Direct, via TechTimes: Raiders supports HDR (a first for the series), failing a raid carries no loot penalty, and there’s a call-for-help feature for pulling other players into a tough run. That no-penalty design choice matters — it makes the Survivalist difficulty a dare rather than a tax.
About those amiibo…
Three new Deep Cut amiibo — Shiver, Frye, and Big Man — launch the same day as the game at $24.99 each. Buy all three and you’ve spent roughly $75 on accessories for a $59.99 game, a bit of math GameSpot was quick to point out. Tapping them unlocks Deep Cut-themed outfits in-game, and the three figures physically connect into one unified display piece — genuinely neat, but let’s be honest: that’s a collector purchase, not a must-have.
Why this matters
Splatoon has quietly become one of Nintendo’s biggest franchises. Splatoon 3 sold 11.96 million copies and stands as the series’ fastest-selling entry, with the franchise past 30 million total. Handing its first-ever spin-off to the Switch 2 as an exclusive is a statement about where Nintendo wants your attention — and the momentum is real. The console is moving at a historic pace: our breakdown of how the Switch 2 outsold the PS5 with 19.86 million units in under a year shows exactly why Nintendo can afford to gate a major franchise behind new hardware.
What’s next
July 23 is only three weeks out, and pre-orders are live now — at $49.94 on Amazon, Raiders undercuts most of what’s launching around it. If you’re mapping out the rest of your year in games, our rundown of the biggest games still coming in 2026 puts Raiders in context alongside everything else fighting for your backlog this fall.
One footnote from the Direct: Nintendo also announced a new Splatfest for Splatoon 3, so the mainline game isn’t going quiet while its spin-off takes the stage.
Featured image: Nintendo Switch 2 by Crisco 1492, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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