Hands-on with Nintendo's fourth Labo kit, which allows users to build their own VR games with six Toy-Con creations and will be available April 12 for $79.99
Nintendo's latest Labo kit lets you code your own VR games — Nearly one year after the launch of Labo, Nintendo's DIY cardboard accessory line …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nearly a year after the original Variety and Robot kits introduced Labo as build-it-yourself cardboard toys for Switch, Nintendo announced on March 7 that it was extending the line into virtual reality with two kits priced at $40 and $80. This hands-on covers the larger $80 tier — the fourth Labo kit — ahead of its April 12 release.
The notable addition over the earlier kits is creative: beyond six Toy-Con VR builds, the kit ships with tools that let users write their own VR games, turning Labo from a set of pre-designed projects into a small creation platform.
First-order effects
- Switch owners get a sub-$100 entry into VR on April 12 — six cardboard Toy-Con builds plus game-coding tools — at a price point well below dedicated headsets like Samsung's Gear VR.
- The coding feature changes what a Labo purchase is: buyers are no longer just assembling Nintendo's designs, they are getting authoring tools for their own VR content.
Second-order effects
- By bundling creation tools into the hardware kit, Nintendo extends each kit's usable life past the initial build-and-play cycle, which matters for a line whose repeat-purchase case depends on new Toy-Con projects.
- Nintendo is effectively competing for the casual-VR audience against phone-based headsets like the Gear VR, which shipped with a bundled controller at $129, using the Switch itself as the screen rather than a smartphone.
Third-order effects
- If user-made Toy-Con games take off, Labo's value shifts from Nintendo-authored content to a community-driven library, making the cardboard accessories a platform rather than one-off toys.
- A working DIY VR layer on Switch would give Nintendo a low-cost experiment in consumer VR without committing to dedicated headset hardware — a hedge against the premium end of the market it has so far skipped.
The trend: Nintendo is evolving Labo from a novelty construction toy into a user-creation platform, using cheap cardboard VR to test whether Switch owners want to make — not just play — their own games.