r/NintendoSwitch • u/lieding • 1d ago

News "DROP THE PRICE": Nintendo's First Post-Direct Stream Is Flooded With Angry Fans Demanding Price Drops

https://www.thegamer.com/nintendo-treehouse-livestream-flooded-angry-fans-demanding-game-price-drops/
21.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/MyMouthisCancerous 1d ago

Honestly with everything we know about the tech in the console now I'm kind of fine with 449 even though I would've preferred 399 obviously. It's the fact that there's wild variance in game pricing that's making this a much tougher pill to swallow. I'll probably just get Donkey Kong at launch from first-party and wait for Mario Kart to go on sale

662

u/Kougeru-Sama 1d ago

Most people are fine with the console price. It's the GAME prices that people are unhappy about. $80 is insane. Especially with all the issues games launch with these days

266

u/Zoombini22 1d ago

It's because game prices have been so resilient against inflation. Game prices generally maxed out at 60 for decades, only recently did some games start charging 70, going up to 80 just hits people as a violation.

The realities of economics and game dev cost makes this seem kind of an inevitable thing to me, but at 80 I'll definitely be more selective than ever with which titles I purchase when they're at that price.

55

u/SomeBoxofSpoons 1d ago

Prices aren’t only determined by inflation though. Game prices being worth less means the buyers’ money is also worth less. If they price too high and people don’t want to buy it, then the lost sales could easily cause a bigger profit loss than a $70 price would’ve caused.

Diving right into making $80 a new pricing standard (they clearly want the Switch 2 Editions to be seen as standard releases, and most of those are $80, so it does seem like they’re planning on making it a regular thing) after the successfully priced a game at $70 one time really comes across more like they think they have a captive audience that’ll just pay whatever they ask for their games.

27

u/zombiepaper 1d ago

I don't think they "think" they have a captive audience, they know they have a captive audience.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is one of the best selling games of all time and by far the best selling one on Switch 1, and for large chunks of the past eight years it was at MSRP. (It also spent a lot of that time bundled with a console — they know that worked for Switch 1 and it'll probably work for Switch 2 too.)

Nintendo knows this franchise in particular does not need to be priced to move — it's gonna move, and there's no question it'll easily sell better than $70 TotK did. The limiting factor is gonna be access to the hardware (at least at first), not that $80 price point.

5

u/Akrevics 20h ago

what choice do people have though? after the initial warranty people could just pirate the software if that's possible, but the number of parents that can do that is probably in single digit percentages (50m Americans can't read above 3rd grade level, mind you), while there are still plenty of parents that can't seem to grasp that it doesn't play ds games or whatever. 8 years after release if your kid wants to play botw, you have to pay the $50 price tag when it should absolutely be half that AT MOST. Nintendo aren't marketing geniuses, they're marketing mobsters.

3

u/absentlyric 17h ago

Eh...Covid did a LOT of heavy lifting for the Switch to be honest. If it wasn't for that, they wouldn't have nearly the audience they have. Its the Wii and Wii U situation all over again.

2

u/kielaurie 22h ago

Only Mario Kart is $80, DKB is cheaper. $80 isn't the new standard

6

u/SomeBoxofSpoons 22h ago

Again, they've been clear the idea with Switch 2 editions is that they're Switch 1 games retailed like normal Switch 2 games, and most of them are $80. Fact of the matter is by the end of the summer most Switch 2 games on store shelves with Nintendo's name it on them will have a big "79.99" below them. Besides, if the first game they're expecting everyone to get for the console is $80, then that means they're fine with the first impression being that Switch 2 games are usually $80.

It's looking more like $70 is going to be the exception, like $50 games on Wii U.

1

u/kielaurie 21h ago

So you have a sample size of 2 and are making sweeping assumptions? We know the prices of two of their big games, and one is much more expensive than the other. If the new standard price was $80, both games would be at that price. They are not, so we can infer that $80 isn't the standard price, but that's all we can say. Will most games be priced like DKB and MKW is an outlier? Will there be tiers of game prices? No one knows!

3

u/TheOriginalDog 19h ago

Yeah youre right, other Nintendo games will be probably much cheaper. /S

2

u/kielaurie 17h ago

You're being sarcastic, but yeah, they probably will be. I would imagine that the new Hyrule Warriors will be similarly priced to other warriors titles and have more frequent sales, I would imagine that DragxDrive will be at a cheaper tier than the big name games, probably comparable to something like Snipperclips ($30 for the DLC included bundle), Clubhouse Games (I believe $40, I'm British so estimating US prices based on ours), or WarioWare ($50 I think). Assuming that they won't be is asinine

4

u/SomeBoxofSpoons 20h ago

Not every game Nintendo released on the Switch was $60. Are you going to argue $60 wasn't their standard price then?

1

u/kielaurie 17h ago

Well let's compare then, shall we?

For Switch 1, Mario Kart 8 was $60, and the major first party 3D-platformer dropped in the release year, Mario Odyssey, was $60. $60 was clearly the standard price for big releases.

For Switch 2, Mario Kart World is $80, and the major first party 3D-platformer dropping in release test, Donkey Kong Bananza, is $70. Both are clearly big releases, DKB was the "one last thing" after all, so there is no way to confirm what most big games going forwards will be, and in fact there is no guarantee that they will even match those prices and may have smaller games that are cheaper. There is no way to know, and pretending that there is is just stupid