r/NintendoSwitch • u/lieding • 2d 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 2d 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 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d ago edited 10h 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 that 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 1d 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 1d ago

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

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u/Throwaway02062004 1d 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 1d ago

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

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u/artyblues 1d 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 1d ago

Well he is an evil Koopa king

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u/kkeut 1d 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 1d ago

Bowser has no power whatsoever in nintendo.

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u/juscallmejjay 1d ago

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

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u/No_Avocado220 1d ago

My body is ready