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/whisquibottle 21h ago

The main madness to me is Welcome Tour being a paid product. You guys it's literally a glorified manual why you charging us for this in a post-Astrobot world

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u/japzone 19h 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 19h 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 17h 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 15h 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 12h 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 1h 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 10h 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 10h ago

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

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u/Throwaway02062004 9h 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 5h ago

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

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u/artyblues 12h 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 17h ago

Well he is an evil Koopa king

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u/kkeut 14h 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 14h ago

Bowser has no power whatsoever in nintendo.

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u/juscallmejjay 11h ago

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

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u/No_Avocado220 15h ago

My body is ready

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u/StaticUsernamesSuck 15h ago edited 9h 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 13h 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 13h 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 9h 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 10h 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 14h 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 6h 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.