Nintendo has cultivated an expectation of expensive games, and even though we don't like it, we've come to accept it. The $20 price hike to $49.99 is the devil's deal we make to play it on a portable platform. Sometimes, we have to rationalize harder: Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster costs less than $30 on Steam and PS4. We often try to rationalize those higher prices - sure, Doom (2016) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt cost more on Switch, but developers had to rebuild and optimize those games to work on Nintendo's lower-powered hardware. On social media we bitterly joke about the "Switch tax" that prices modern ports of older games at a premium. And yet Nintendo has no reason to drop prices - it's selling more copies of its games than its competitors and making more money on each copy sold.Īnd, for better or worse, Nintendo fans have gotten used to expensive games. PlayStation had to cut its price to keep buyers interested in Kratos meanwhile, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has been selling in record numbers at full price since launch. To put that in perspective, one of the PlayStation 4's best-selling games, God of War, had sold an estimated 12 million copies by June 2019, and is Amazon's 23rd best-selling PS4 game. And the game is still a top seller: It's still the fifth-best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch eShop and to this day is Amazon's ninth-best-selling Nintendo Switch game. According to Nintendo's latest fiscal earnings report, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold over 33 million copies since launch - earning Nintendo a potentially staggering windfall. We pay full price, and continue to pay full price, no matter how old the games are.Īs usual, math and economics ruin everything. It's just following our lead - because as much as we'd like to pay less for the Nintendo Switch versions of reissued Wii U games, we don't. Like Nintendo is being unfair.īut Nintendo isn't being unfair. As buyers, we've come to expect it, and that expectation makes Nintendo's consistently high prices feel jarring. It feels like an industry standard practice. Xbox, PlayStation and PC game releases often see big price drops within the first year, or not long after. Marvel's Spider-Man was released that same year and was given a similar $20 price drop in February 2019.
God of War for PS4 launched in April 2018 for $59.99, but by October the price was permanently lowered to just $39.99.
Nintendo's competitors, like Sony, routinely and permanently drop prices for big-budget AAA games.
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