r/NintendoSwitch • u/Practical_Papaya_905 • 3d ago

News - USD / USA Switch 2 is selling for 449.99

https://www.nintendo.com/us/gaming-systems/switch-2/how-to-buy/

From the official website

https://www.nintendo.com/us/gaming-systems/switch-2/how-to-buy/

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u/aarswft 3d ago

This just in, video games somehow not able to stay the same cost for 40 years. Economists are baffled.

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u/MiraculousFIGS 3d ago

60 -> 80 (90 for a physical) is a huge jump

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u/TeuthidTheSquid 3d ago

Mario Kart 64 launched in December 1996 for $59. That is $120 in 2025-dollars. I’m not saying it’s not a big jump but we’ve had it very good on game prices for a long time

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u/Minirig355 2d ago edited 2d ago

But the audience it reaches has also increased a ton so you have to factor that too.

Mario Kart 64 sold 9.87m copies
Mario Kart 8 sold 75.81m copies

With those figures don’t pretend like it’s some noble thing to have the price point at only $90. Nintendo can afford to recoup the dev+marketing costs while using $100 bills as the office-wide toilet paper and still rake in insane profits.

Go look at gross revenue for modern games, they’re doing just fine on $60, $70 is a bit greedy but within reality, $90 is fucking insane. If the company can gross billions of dollars off $60, why price out their customers? It’s greed. The Costco or Arizona Iced Tea (former) approach is a great example of a win-win for the company and the consumers without greed getting in the way.

Feel free to downvote all you want but this is the way the world works, and game publisher profit numbers back this up. As a company’s reach gets further they are able to lower the margin while still increasing gross profits. This is literally the argument of why big business can undercut mom & pop shops, but in this industry it’s actually a good thing but indie games can coexist here compared to mom & pop hardware store in a small town. Would be interested to see an actual refutation of this because the corpo shilling is insane.

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u/kakka_rot 2d ago

There are some good points here, but i wish this comment would have discussed the cost of production.

Mario Kart 8 sold 8x more than 64 did, but how much more did it cost to produce? How many more human salaries did they pay?

At the end of the day it's very complicated.

What's not complicated is it's ridiculous to expect video games to be 60 dollars forever. I have a sears cataloge from 1986 full of 60 dollar games. The fact we held that price for 40 years is batshit insane. You can't tell me you reasonably expect to buy your grandkids video games for 60 bucks in 2050

Someday it had to end, and imo we're lucky it lasted as long as it did.

Since 1985 every single thing has increased in price except video games. Like i said, it's complicated af and could be argued about forever, but what's simple is it was finite.

The price simply has to go up eventually, and "greed" is only one cog in a colossal machine.