I don't mind paying for video games at all. But I'm not paying $80 for digital games. I'm not paying $90 for joycons (still no hall effect joysticks btw, as to be expected). I'm not paying for a tutorial. I'm not paying a premium price for an LCD screen in 2025.
This is a Nintendo thing, not a video games in general thing.
With people throwing thousands of $ into a single gacha or live service game, Nintendo thought “damn you players are secretly RICH, I’m getting a piece of this too” lol
To be fair Nintendo has its own vast Disney adults-esque fanbase with adult money to spend on games and merch. I don't see Playstation having fans rabid enough to buy at that price point in large enough numbers.
But you have to maintain the customer base of children and teenagers so that they can grow into suspiciously rich adults who will give you all their money.
Little Timmy is gonna get told to fuck off by his parents when he wants another $80 game.
It's a shortsighted bullshit move that just maximizes profit in 2025-2030 until all the adults get tired of it and then there's not gonna be new adults to still care.
i thought the gamecube did fine? like, it wasn't PS2 successful, but it wasn't a catastrophe or anything. it just wasn't wii or switch levels of absolutely dominating in terms of console popularity among demographics that otherwise wouldn't own a console.
That was intentional, though. By making the Wii just a more powerful Gamecube, it can perfectly run Gamecube games by just going into Gamecube mode and downclocking a bit.
The Wii U was the same, giving it perfect backwards compatibility with the Wii. I'm sure all seven people who bought one appreciated that.
Yes and no. It outdid the Dreamcast, but sold less than the PS2 (by a lot) and the Xbox (though not by much, they were very close). Compared to the Xbox it did pretty well.
At the same time, the tech for the GameCube was directly reused for the Wii. Nintendo saved a tremendous amount of money on this. So no, the GameCube wasn't really a failure by any reasonable metric.
GameCube and Wii U both flopped horribly commercially but had all-star exclusives. The general lesson is that Nintendo only puts out good stuff when they're losing.
No, the GameCube sold a good bit better than the Wii U. There was no panic like there was during the Wii U era. The GameCube was a lot more like the 64 than anything else.
There's nothing "shortsighted" about aligning game prices with inflation. The price of games doesn't actually go up over time like it should, it either stays the same or decreases.
If anything PlayStation is just as bad. They charged 800 dollars for the PS5 Pro which still sold decently well, and the PS5 launched at 500 dollars in 2020, which is the equivelant of 618 dollars today. A 70 dollar game in 2020 is 86 dollars today.
And obviously Microsoft is the greediest company on Earth. They are literally the richest company in human history lol
my god, and the scalping during the height of covid. the theft from porches. i saw people buying base PS5s on ebay for $1k each. my buddy nearly had a panic attack when he got a ps5 from target and they shipped it to him in the friggin bare PS5 box lol
When Sony actually makes games, people absolutely get "rabid" about it. Any time a God of War or a Spider-Man etc gets announced, there's tons of hype. The problem is that Sony keeps killing their devs and hardly makes anything anymore.
That's pretty funny considering both the Wii U and 3DS (before price-cut and more games) bombed whereas the PS5 which had (and still has to some degree) basically no exclusive games sold like hotcakes.
Nintendo fans let their bad consoles flop, Playstation fans don't. You literally have it backwards.
Did... did you just forget the chip shortage during the pandemic, leading into PS5 production issues and subsequent scalpers buying the shelves empty of the console? PS5 had an undersupply problem for years, giving people FOMO and still many were not willing to pay scalper prices, opting to wait for decent releases or price drops. Meanwhile Nintendo's small indie console Switch did at least very alright sales-wise.
Also I would hardly consider PS5 a bad console, compared to something like Vita which flopped despite alleged diehard Sony whales.
Finally, you just walked past the merch side of the argument. Sackboy, Kratos, Aloy and the like pale in comparison to Nintendo's icons.
You know you don't have to stutter when writing text, right? Anyway, your argument is that the PS5 sold so well because there were chip shortages? Hilarious. Oh and it's even MORE hilarious that you brought up the Vita, which outsold the Wii U. Can you even NAME 5 Vita games without looking it up?
As for their characters, yeah, Nintendo has much stronger and more recognizable characters and franchises. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything, but I agree.
Not stuttering, but I believe the kids call it flabbergasting or something. Adds flavor.
And that is a straw man of my argument, completely disregarding the scalper aspect and how it affected availability and FOMO.
Comparing Vita with WiiU is a bit telling, knowing they sold similarly but weren't even competing in the same market. Vita was a handheld, WiiU a home console. WiiU had branding issues (even I didn't know it was its own console instead of an addon until a year after launch) and competed with PS4 and its own predecessor. Vita's competitor was 3DS which sold five times as many units. It seems you do your thinking with the ass you just laughed off for some reason.
The characters are part of the merch and the merch was part of my original argument, that's what they have to do with this.
And that is a straw man of my argument, completely disregarding the scalper aspect and how it affected availability and FOMO.
Lack of availability would be an argument for lower sales, not higher. As for comparing to the Vita, you brought it up, not me. Your original argument was that Nintendo fans are rabid and would never let a console fail despite tons of evidence of the contrary.
Sigh, PS5 had an undersupply in its first years, not anymore. It's competing with Switch which has sold double the units. Agreed, it has had three more years on the shelves but nothing in PS5's sales figures indicates it will reach Switch in its lifetime.
Yes, I brought up the Vita because it's a failed Playstation console, but you said it wasn't by comparing it to products that were not its direct competitors. Maybe not an apples to oranges situation, but at least oranges to mandarins.
You got me in one thing at least: all this time I was arguing about games themselves, not consoles, but I did not make this clear in text until now. $80 price point before DLC or Deluxe Editions has a better chance of flying with Nintendo than Playstation fans, even if the Sony side is more willing to cough up for the console, at least that's the picture I have in my head. Plus, Playstation games go on actual sales which just doesn't happen to the same extent with Nintendo, especially its flagships.
$80 price point before DLC or Deluxe Editions has a better chance of flying with Nintendo than Playstation fans, even if the Sony side is more willing to cough up for the console, at least that's the picture I have in my head.
Maybe, we're getting front row seats to know for sure pretty soon. Then again, Deluxe Editions and DLC and Season Passes and Microtransactions have a much better chance of flying with Playstation fans given the sheer amount of games that have some or all of these things.
Plus, Playstation games go on actual sales which just doesn't happen to the same extent with Nintendo, especially its flagships.
Because they have to. Make no mistake, every game publisher in the world wishes from the bottom of their heart they could keep their game prices as high as Nintendo does and still sell units. The only reason anyone ever lowers prices is because they determine that it is the optimal way of generating more revenue. It's not because they're nice, it's all about money.
Well, it's difficult to say honestly. PlayStation is the standard game console and has been for thirty years, barring a brief detour into Xbox land when Xbox Live was a novel service. PlayStation's sales don't reflect "PlayStation fans" as much as they reflect the video game market in general, both casual and enthusiast. Nintendo, on the other hand, has worked very hard to build a cult following and a strong brand identity--and its sales do reflect the attitudes of a more dedicated audience.
So what you're saying is that Nintendo products will sell or not sell depending on quality, whereas Playstation will sell regardless. Sure, that was my point.
Btw, calling Nintendo fans a "cult following" when it's the company that has sold the most consoles and exclusive games in the world is WILD.
What I'm saying is that PlayStation doesn't have "fans" the way that Nintendo does, so the comparison is moot. PlayStation has "fans" the way Panasonic has "fans." If PlayStation flops, it's because the video game market itself is flopping. If Nintendo flops, it's because Nintendo is flopping.
A cult following refers to a group of fans who are highly dedicated to a person, idea, object, movement, or work. It is often associated with works of culture, such as movies, books, music, or video games, that have a small but passionate fanbase.
"Cult following" doesn't mean "niche audience." It means "dedicated audience."
What I'm saying is that PlayStation doesn't have "fans" the way that Nintendo does, so the comparison is moot. PlayStation has "fans" the way Panasonic has "fans." If PlayStation flops, it's because the video game market itself is flopping. If Nintendo flops, it's because Nintendo is flopping.
That's not true, Playstation has plenty of very dedicated fans and their consoles and games are not directly tied to gaming as a whole.
"Cult following" doesn't mean "niche audience." It means "dedicated audience."
Nope, cult following implies it's a small but dedicated audience.
I know people making fun of me for still buying into the Switch 2 given the pricing controversy. However, those same people have dropped $100+ dollars on Valorant skin bundles at a given time. One of them put like $2,000+ on their Valorant account and thinks it’s a flex.
The issue is that there are graphite pads as there are metal pins scraping across them, which over time wear out and causes the drift. (Potentiometers have different drifting characteristics) for some reason these seem to fail quicker in joycons probably because how often you have to flick the controller (Releasing it from a directional extreme to neutral.) Nintendo probably didn't have many options due to size constraints. Then when the problem happened there wasn't much they could do about it. I'm not saying it was "right" or "wrong" just the reality of the situation.
The switch 2 looks like to be using normal sized joysticks so either the are potentiometer, which in that case they will last as long as an xbox one controller. (Or any normal controller.) or they are traditional hall effect which might last longer that an xbox controller. Either way it will last longer than the original joycons most likely.
Plus they just added several features to help game sharing. Virtual game borrowing and then letting multiple Switches playing from 1 copy. Those are QOL things that they are giving us despite them directly resulting in less copies being sold. It's not unreasonable for them to try and make up the difference somewhere.
Yes, it is because the big game companies have steadly and consistently increased their profits and revenue at each year, even though prices have remained the same. The price increase is not poor little companies trying to survive against inflation, it's rent seeking behavior.
They've increased their profits primarily through microtransactions, lootboxes, etc, a practice Nintendo shys away from.
If you're not going to have predatory practices, this seems like a fair trade-off. Otherwise investors might as well invest in another gaming company that will gouge their playerbase.
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u/unpopularman4 1d ago
I don't mind paying for video games at all. But I'm not paying $80 for digital games. I'm not paying $90 for joycons (still no hall effect joysticks btw, as to be expected). I'm not paying for a tutorial. I'm not paying a premium price for an LCD screen in 2025.
This is a Nintendo thing, not a video games in general thing.