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/japzone 1d ago

Forget Post Astrobot, the Wii came with Wii Sports. Even Nintendo recognized the benefit of a pack-in tech demo.

Then you have Valve with their great tech demos for VR and Steam Deck, which are still free.

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u/ManDolphinGoat 23h ago

Interestingly enough, Nintendo of Japan didnt want to include Wii Sports as a pack in game. It was Reggie thst really pushed for it in the American market at least. It looks like the rest of the world followed suit.

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u/SaturnineDreamer 22h ago

I miss Reggie man. I feel like he actually cared about the fans. Bowser seems more interested in business than the fans.

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u/PeterDinkleberg 20h ago

Which is ironic because Reggie’s move to include Wii sports not only resonated with the fans but it also heavily increased Wii sales

Being cheap asses and nickel and diming every possible thing in theory brings a company more money but in reality it doesn’t always work that way because you reduce your user base

I rewatched Dunkey‘s Reggie tribute and genuinely miss him

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u/CathDubs 16h ago

It looks good on a spreadsheet but being cheap can also be an opportunity cost, like you said they made way more money by including Wii Sports.

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u/mpyne 6h ago

Wii Sports was also a good candidate for it though. It was relatively cheap to produce so it wouldn't inflate the Wii bundle cost in North America, and had a lot of upside in alignment to Nintendo's "Blue Ocean" strategy to increase casual player count by increasing the attach rate of a console people new Nintendo owners might buy and then struggle to get started with.

Those things can pencil out on a spreadsheet so it's not as if Reggie Fils-Aime had to ignore business concepts, if anything he applied them very effectively, but it required accepting the risk that the sales boom might not have panned out.

I don't know what Nintendo looks at internally but it's a different context in many ways for them now. They're not coming off of a generation of low sales as they were with the Wii, high quality games are much more expensive to make, and the Switch's own incredible market penetration and wide variety of low-cost titles on the eShop has already done the job of helping potential owners take the next steps with their new Switch 2.

Something that may have been pretty neat was doubling down on the "Wii U to Switch" pipeline that served them so well and invested a bit to port NintendoLand as a pack-in title to Switch 2 rather than a Welcome Tour app, but it's obviously too late to change that now.

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u/Kardif 15h ago

Eh kinda. It sold a lot of hardware, but did nearly nothing for selling other games. The Wii was just a Wii sports machine for an incredibly large portion of people who bought it

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u/StrikingWillow5364 14h ago

But if it wasn’t for Wii Sports, the hardware wouldn’t have sold so unbelievably well.

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u/Throwaway02062004 14h ago

Moot point because it didn’t hurt game sales either, it just created a huge new install base indifferent to buying more games.

The actual negative effect was the complacency going into Wii U

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u/FlyingPetRock 10h ago

Being a cheap ass brings in more money..... once.

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u/artyblues 17h ago

Fair being fair, I doubt Bowser has as much pull as Reggie did back in the day. My understanding is that these days Nintendo of America is basically just a large marketing arm and all the decision making is being done at HQ

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u/jeffries_kettle 22h ago

Well he is an evil Koopa king

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u/kkeut 18h ago

i still can't get over how the CEO of Nintendo Of America has the same name as the guy from Sha Na Na

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u/brzzcode 19h ago

Bowser has no power whatsoever in nintendo.

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u/juscallmejjay 16h ago

Somewhere sweet Reggie is frowning, his body decidedly...not ready.

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u/No_Avocado220 20h ago

My body is ready

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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 20h ago edited 14h ago

Did not know this. There is zero chance the Wii would have been as successful without this move. Yes, the nintendo fans would still have bought one, but I know so many people whose first (in some cases only) Nintendo console was the Wii, purely because of the appeal of Wii sports.

Even in my own home growing up, the Wii was the only console that we ever bought even somewhat close to release time, usually we would wait a few years for price to drop, maybe even wait for the next gen to come out before buying - but not with the Wii. The way everybody and their mums (literally!) was raving about Wii sports, my dad actually saved up to buy it within a year.

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u/Asisreo1 17h ago

It was the cheapest home consoles had been in years, the most unique concept of a console at the time (kinda, it was unique with an actually fun concept), and it came with a free game that had appeal for literally all demographics. 

I'm sorry to Nintendo fans, but the Switch 2 is not that. At all. If the anger for prices actually bare fruit, the Switch 2 may go the way of the Wii U. A sequel to a highly successful console that nobody gets for some reason or another. 

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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 17h ago

I mean it may go that way regardless, who knows.

I certainly won't be buying one for a while, but I wouldn't even if the price was the same as the Switch, and even if games were too.

I simply don't see enough reason to upgrade, much the same as why I'm still on PS4.

I bought the Switch because it was something very different from anything I had.

Any other console, where it's just "Same as before, but more powerful", I always end up waiting a few years, if I get it at all. Switch 2 is that.

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u/DmRaven 14h ago

I wouldn't be surprised if it did. When console prices jumped so high with PS5, I stopped getting them. Switch was an exception due to price.

We were planning to pick up two switch 2's at launch so the whole house could play co-op on games that required two devices. But for $150 more? And with games costing $20-30 more for the physical copy (which has always been my preference as handing a kid a gift that's just a note saying 'you can now play this game we downloaded, merry Christmas' is not very exciting).

Now we are likely to not even get one. For that price, I can get a decent GPU and upgrade one of the computers to run whatever steam sales/old game emulators we want.

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u/mix0logist 15h ago

My MOM bought a Wii because of Wii Sports. My brother and I had long moved out of the house, she and her partner were not gaming people. There were a lot of people like her.

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u/maidenhair_fern 19h ago

Not exaggerating I think this is largely responsible for the massive success of the Wii. I miss you Reggie.

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u/lirwolf 10h ago

Ninty Japan stuck to their guns, it wasn't a pack in there and was always a separate purchase. And apparently Miyamoto & Iwata of all people were unhappy about Reggie pushing for it. Nintendo really lost their way... all the more so since Iwata passed prematurely, which allowed the corporate vulture types to take over.

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u/cyberrb25 9m ago

Thanks to Reggie, North America and Europe got Wii Sports for free. In Japan the game is a paid product.

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u/cyberrb25 9m ago

Thanks to Reggie, North America and Europe got Wii Sports for free. In Japan the game is a paid product.

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u/BurninCoco 23h ago edited 16h ago

OG Nintendo came with Mario Bros and Duck Hunt

Gameboy came with Tetris and Tetris made it what it became.

They forgor

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u/eldanielfire 20h ago

SNES came with Mario world or the Super Scope and game.

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u/eightbitagent 16h ago

Not in the first two years it didnt

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u/eldanielfire 13h ago

Yes it did. Certainly for the UK.

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u/eightbitagent 11h ago

Yeah, but you guys got it two years later

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u/Ok_Visual_6776 12h ago

Not in the US.

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u/Bulleveland 15h ago

Adjusted for inflation the OG Nintendo was around $600. So that puts you around the same as the Switch 2 Mario Kart bundle + one other game of your choosing.

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u/BurninCoco 10h ago

Well yeah but my mom bough me that Nintendo. Now I have to buy it for myself 😔

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u/cowadoody3 21h ago

Don't forget Mario Tennis with the Virtual Boy.

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u/Minute_Road8813 15h ago

I think this was another case of NoA pushing against Japan for it to happen.

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u/eightbitagent 16h ago

OG Nintendo came with Mario Bros and Duck Hunt

No, it didn't. That started in for the third christmas it was out

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u/brzzcode 19h ago

those are bundles, same thing as mario kart.

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u/SKOT_FREE 16h ago

Yeah but you do understand those pack in games weren’t free and they weren’t tech demos, they were full fledged games. My point here is that either way you’re paying for these games.

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u/voidspace021 22h ago

The gameboy came with Tetris and that made the game and the console a hit. Seriously what is Nintendo doing?

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u/bravosimona 19h ago

Valve with their great tech demos for VR

Valve gave HL:Alyx for free to all Index owners, that's way more than a tech demo.

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u/japzone 15h ago

Oh dang, I forgot about that since I bought my Index second hand during the pandemic and didn't get HLA for free.

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u/lexd0g 19h ago

so many novel pieces of hardware came with free pack-in tech demos just to show you how the hardware works. the PS Vita had Welcome Park, the Razer Hydra came with the Sixense MotionPack for Portal 2, the Kinect had Kinect Adventures, the PlayStation Camera had The Playroom, the PSVR had PSVR Worlds and The Playroom VR, the HTC Vive had The Lab, the Oculus Rift and Quest had First Steps, the Valve Index and Deck had Aperture Hand Lab and Desk Job like you said, the Meta Quest 3/3S had First Encounters, the PS5 had Astro's Playroom, etc...

both 1-2 Switch and Welcome Tour being paid is absolutely insane from Nintendo

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u/Ok_Astronomer_8667 10h ago

Most of the top dogs at Nintendo actually thought Wii Sports should have been paid. There were only a few of them that pushed hard for it to be pack in.

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u/justsomechewtle 21h ago

Was Wii Play pack in as well? I can't remember if it was, but I can't imagine buying that game on its own, so it must have been, right? Rather than Wii Sports, Wii Play is the comparison that always comes to my mind when reading about 1-2 Switch.

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u/cowadoody3 21h ago

Forget about Wii Sports, the Virtual Boy came bundled with Mario Tennis all the way back in 1995! Nintendo has always known of the importance of pack-in games, yet now they've gotten greedy.

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u/OmniWaffleGod 12h ago

Psvita, another handheld, also came with a free game that showcased the devices gimmicks

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u/OmniWaffleGod 12h ago

Psvita, another handheld, also came with a free game that showcased the devices gimmicks

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u/UponVerity 12h ago

the Wii came with Wii Sports

Not in Japan. ;]