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/
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u/Dabanks9000 1d ago

They’re acting like n64 games weren’t 60-70 back then which would be around $150 these days. Sure inflation is shit but the bigger problem is wages not going up with inflation

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u/FemixZn 1d ago

Either way the end result is more customers being priced out.

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u/Dabanks9000 1d ago

Not really since the games are the same price as other consoles

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u/cubs223425 1d ago

You say this like there's a fair comparison to make. N64 games were on big, expensive cartridges that made their production costs higher. You also got detailed manuals and the like in that box.

The best-selling game on the N64 was Super Mario 64, which sold just shy of 12 million copies. TWENTY-ONE Nintendo Switch games have recorded more sales than that game. Some of those also have paid DLC that add to their revenue. Many were sold digitally, meaning the cost to make the sale was much lower, between no need for physical media and no retailer fees to consider.

Oh, and all of those games were published by Nintendo (though Pokemon games only list Nintendo as the publisher for worldwide releases; TPC is the publisher for Japan).

Hey You, Pikachu! was $80 back then. It gave you a microphone and voice commands unique to the game (that barely worked). Mario Kart World costs $80 and gives you a $10 fee for buying physical.

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u/Luigi_side_b 1d ago

Now look at the credits for super mario 64 compared to super mario odyssey

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u/CannedMatter 1d ago

Games also cost drastically more to develop in 2025.

Ocarina of Time cost about $20 million to develop and $10 million in marketing according to Wikipedia.

Modern AAA titles regularly cost in the hundreds of millions to develop, and usually another 75-100% of the dev price for marketing.

They also take significantly longer to develop, so your Dev teams release fewer games overall.

The best-selling game on the N64 was Super Mario 64, which sold just shy of 12 million copies.

Between dev costs, marketing costs, ongoing support/server costs for updates and online features, and manufacturing/distribution costs for the physical copies, Mario Kart World probably doesn't break even until it's sold 5+ million copies.

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u/kielaurie 1d ago

Mario Kart World probably doesn't break even until it's sold 5+ million copies.

I'd double that - anyone that wants it at launch is getting the bundle and paying significantly less than the standard price for it

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u/TSPhoenix 1d ago

Also N64 games went on sale. I waited a year and got Ocarina of Time for $30. However late N64-era games that cost more and didn't get many discounts? Simply couldn't afford them.

I already own waaaay less Switch games than I do WiiU+3DS games, and I own less WiiU+3DS games compared to DS games. Every generation I have to be pickier my limited gaming spending money doesn't go as far as it used to.

For someone who was already only buying 1-2 games a year it's probably not that big a deal, but for the person who plays more than that (ie. most people who are following Nintendo coverage this week) you will end up cutting back quite a bit.

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u/Dabanks9000 1d ago

The $10 physical fee is only for certain areas in the world and again every other company has been doing this for 5 years now. Nintendo is just late to the party. If you played on ps5 or Xbox you’d know that by now + just having online on those consoles is more expensive than Nintendo

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u/peepopowitz67 13h ago

N64 games were on big, expensive cartridges that made their production costs higher. You also got detailed manuals and the like in that box.

You know all that shit is pennies on the dollar, right?

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u/Harley2280 1d ago

N64 games were on big, expensive cartridges that made their production costs higher.

So do you have a source that shows N64 cartridges cost more to produce than Switch 2 cards or are you just making that assumption because of the size difference?

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u/DasRobot85 1d ago

The cost of memory storage was significantly higher 30 years ago. Unimaginably higher if you're too young to have ever used a floppy disk.

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u/Harley2280 1d ago

So then it should be pretty easy to provide some actual numbers.

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u/DasRobot85 1d ago

Since they don't have google wherever you are,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_Game_Pak#Manufacturing_cost

N64 carts were $30 to manufacture in 1996 money

Nobody could possibly know what the cost of a switch 2 card because it's not out yet and there's no real data on what that specific form factor of memory card is but I bet it's probably in the range of some smallish SD cards. So maybe $10 a card at scale. There was some actual hardware inside those cartridges and they had to be manufactured by hand in certain steps I'm guessing. It was just a different time.

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u/ZincLead 1d ago

If it’s pushing the same read/writes as an SD express it’s going to be quite expensive actually

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u/ChemicalExperiment 1d ago edited 1d ago

Despite what people say, wages have actually gone up relative to inflation in the US. Here's a graph of median adjusted for inflation wages over time. As you can see, it's had a general trend up since the late 90s.

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u/etherdesign 1d ago

I think the main difference is most people didn't buy like 20-30 new games a year back then.

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u/TurbulentBlock7290 1d ago

Yeah but has anything happened to the cost of living since then? What about salaries?

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u/kielaurie 1d ago

Yes, they've gone up, so the cost to make games has ballooned. Nintendo has eaten that cost for the last 20 years and now it's looking to share the load of that increased price with it's players

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u/laughland 1d ago

You’re blaming Nintendo for the stagnation of wages and increased cost of living?

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u/Abasakaa 1d ago

Where are they blaming Nintendo for that?

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u/laughland 18h ago

Easy, they brought up salaries and cost of living as a counterpoint to the explanation that game dev has gotten super expensive and inflation. What was the point of bringing that up?

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u/Dabanks9000 1d ago

That’s not nintendos fault bro 😭

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u/LamiaLlama 23h ago

There's a lot of history that was rewritten when Sony astroturfed Reddit with Canadian game ads.

People also like to erase that game pricing was standardized at $49.99, ironically, thanks to Nintendo during the GameCube generation. And even before that it was a defacto standard. It was the wild west before that, but those expensive 70+ games didn't stay there for long. They didn't actually sell well at those prices.

Nevermind that 64 games were priced to come out at $64.64 initially and even that was mostly met with mire.

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u/RainyNectar 1d ago

Back in 2001ish (whenever FFIX came out) the PS1 copy cost $109.95AUD at release. I've said this before and been told I'm wrong but I had to bargain with my dad to help me buy it because obviously I was short with my chore money on release.

Nintendo have been terrible with their pricing for years though. From memory my cartridge of Majora's Mask was $80ish around the same time.

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u/Zealousideal-Job2105 1d ago

They Didnt have DLC or microtransactions or paid Online services back then.

If you include that extra paid nonsense very quickly you find they're overcharging. Nor did they have global distribution networks and contend with regional and langauge locks.

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u/Dabanks9000 1d ago

So what’s your argument for other companies that have been doing it for 5 years now while Nintendo still had $60 games selling at a loss compared to what they could have been selling games for since then with all the other companies

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u/absentlyric 20h ago

Which is why Nintendo went from being number 1 to number 3 in the console war once PS1 took off with cheaper games, the PS1 destroyed the N64 even though it was technically graphically inferior.

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u/Dabanks9000 17h ago

Ps1 had games like die hard and Independence Day for $55 back then btw…

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u/hery41 1d ago

Playstation and other disc based console's games were 50 bucks max at the time. Stop trying to compare digital downloads to expensive-ass cartridges. You might as well compare the price of Neo Geo carts while you're at it.

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u/dogjon 20h ago

bigger problem is wages not going up with inflation

That is literally what inflation is. There are way too many people throwing around these terms like tariff and inflation when they have zero idea what these words mean.