The Nintendo Switch

[Seto Kaiba]

"AAA" game development has been headed in this direction for a long time, price-wise.

It was never a matter of "if" they would cross the threshold of $60/game, only "when".  Studio spending on game development has only increased, while average sales volumes for games haven't really grown at the same rate.  About 5,000 games have been developed for the Nintendo Switch and only about 2% of those have sold more than 1M units.  Taking the simplest possible case of a game with no physical sales and no marketing, if your retail price point is $60 you need to move 24K copies for every $1M you spend developing it just to have any hope of breaking even after the retailer's cut.  If you spend more than $41M developing your game, you need to be a Top 100 game with over 1M sales to break even.  Some first-party Nintendo games like ToTK are rumored to have exceeded $100M.

So Nintendo's looking at the ugly calculus of their profit margin and, instead of focusing on leaner development and tighter scopes for games are opting to raise game prices to buy themselves more breathing room.  At $80/game, the sales per $1M is down to 18K.

Open world games in particular are massive money pits, and Nintendo seems to be leading with one. 

[Tking22]

6 minutes ago, azrael said:

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) has been the model for of the tech industry for a while. Gaming has been the one area that's been lagging behind on it.

Oh I know, it's just a bummer that with Nintendo being one of the big three, the biggest of the three, we're now officially here. Ubisoft caught flack for their stance on the matter, and their comments about gamers needing to get comfortable no longer truly "owning" their games, Sony and Microsoft have been doing it too, so there's been precedent. I just felt my Switch 1 library was vastly more physical then digital. If/when I ever grab a Switch 2, that's no longer really a thing. 

[mikeszekely]

As a PC gamer I'm used to digital-only, you don't actually own anything software. It might be sad to say but it doesn't bother me anymore. What bothers me is the perceived value. $80 seems like too much for a Mario Kart game, even if it is an open world Forza Horizon type. I've already been resisting the jump to $70.  Plus I have to wonder when the next $80 game is coming... it's one thing to charge $80 for a massive game I could spend hundreds of hours on, but what about something like the next 2D Mario? I mean, I remember liking Super Mario Wonder, but that's about all I remember because it was over super quick. There's no way I could justify $80 on a Super Mario Wonder 2, but I could see Nintendo charging that much just because it's Mario.

And the console itself. I expected it to cost more, given that Nintendo hasn't dropped the price of the Switch 1 in  eight years, but at $450 we're awfully close to the PS5's price without the PS5’s performance.

So yeah... I was pretty excited for the Switch 2, but again as I do most of my gaming on PC I think I'm better off upgrading my desktop and maybe holding off a bit on the  Switch 2, at least until there's a Switch 2 exclusive I want more than Mario Kart or Donkey Kong.

[Mommar]

7 hours ago, Tking22 said:

Rockstar said GTA VI could be $100, now Nintendo set a new precedent, and if I was Rockstar, I'd certainly be thinking why not? Also.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/04/02/nintendo-switch-2-flips-the-switch-on-80-90-games/

Not all Switch 2 games will be $80 or $90, but some absolutely will be, I'd guess all Nintendo first party titles, or since it's Nintendo, whichever ones they feel like charging that much for depending on how shitty they feel that day. Mario Cart is merely one example, getting a discount buying it bundled is great, but if you don't the price is what it is, too much IMO. Also, also.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/some-physical-nintendo-switch-2-games-will-be-download-only-game-key-cards

Physical games are a code in a box, for $10 more when they decide to charge this nonsense. I don't care about Steam, Steam is a mess of shovelware, pure garbage, and nonsense, it shouldn't be compared to Nintendo getting blatantly absurd with their pricing. If you're okay with all this more power to you, the more this kind of bullshit gets normalized and people try to justify it the worse it will get, Nintendo will learn and change nothing, and bottom line, Nintendo is setting a new standard for absurd pricing for mainstream games.

I'm not new in thinking and feeling this way, since yesterday people have been, rightfully, blowing up about this. these prices are awful, Nintendo sucks and has for a good while as far as customer good will goes, they coast by on their IPs but they are worse then Sony and Microsoft as far as games companies go, that's how I feel bottom line.

First of all where are they getting the $80-$90 number from?  The most expensive game we know of is Mario Kart, which is $80 physical and $50 digital.

Rockstar says "maybe" and you say it's maybe, Forbes says maybe for Nintendo and suddenly it's fact and Nintendo is the fall of the video game industry.

Second, not every game is a code on a cart.  Street Fighter 6 is, that's all we know of so far.

 

Why is Nintendo worse?  Because they won't duke you a console at a loss?

[Hikuro]

Very disappointing that a handheld like this still can't produce actual 4K resolution on its own or something very close unless you dock it. I guess it just takes up to much power or something else, I'm not expert, I just know that for the size and the pricing, that should of been a thing. 

Now granted there are def. some games I'd be interested in playing on the Switch 2, but I'm just not eager for that 450 price tag right now. 

[mikeszekely]

37 minutes ago, Mommar said:

First of all where are they getting the $80-$90 number from?  The most expensive game we know of is Mario Kart, which is $80 physical and $50 digital.

https://www.thegamer.com/mario-kart-world-price-physical-copy-90-80-dollars-fans-furious/

It's not $50 digital, it's $80 digital.  It's only $50 if you buy the Switch 2 Mario Kart bundle.

Nintendo hasn't come out and said that it's going to cost more in the States for a physical game card, but based on pricing in other regions they're going to charge more for a physical game card in the States.

44 minutes ago, Mommar said:

Why is Nintendo worse?  Because they won't duke you a console at a loss?

Who says Nintendo is worse?  I'm not paying $80-$100 for GTA, either.

[Mommar]

16 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

https://www.thegamer.com/mario-kart-world-price-physical-copy-90-80-dollars-fans-furious/

It's not $50 digital, it's $80 digital.  It's only $50 if you buy the Switch 2 Mario Kart bundle.

Nintendo hasn't come out and said that it's going to cost more in the States for a physical game card, but based on pricing in other regions they're going to charge more for a physical game card in the States.

Who says Nintendo is worse?  I'm not paying $80-$100 for GTA, either.

I don't care about an article, where is the game announcement?  Euros aren't dollars.

Tking said they were worse.

[azrael]

1 hour ago, Hikuro said:

Very disappointing that a handheld like this still can't produce actual 4K resolution on its own or something very close unless you dock it. I guess it just takes up to much power or something else, I'm not expert, I just know that for the size and the pricing, that should of been a thing.

🤨  That's not quite how it works. The SoC can output to 4k even if it wasn't docked. The reason the onboard display isn't 4k is because rendering on a 4k 8" display is stupidly small at native resolution. A 4k 8" display has a 550-ish PPI. Even if you drop the resolution to 1080p, you still have to use each of those 8.3M pixels. An 8" 1080p screen has ~279 PPI, which would be very crisp at that size. On top of that, it's refreshing the screen at 120Hz. That's the best we should do for that size of a screen. Yes, driving 4k on such a small device uses a lot of power, but it's also a waste of power because you can't read anything that small. You have to drop the resolution, which would be a waste of a 4k screen.

[Scyla]

I‘m not surprised that the costs for game prices are going up. They have been around the $60 range for years (or even decades). And they have been getting cheaper instead of more expensive (if I remember correctly I paid roughly $75 in the EU for Majora‘s Mask when it was released in 2000).

For some reason, despite inflation and exploding development costs, publishers decided to stick to the $60 price tag while developers tried to implement new schemes to offset the rising costs with micro transactions, additional service fees, day 1 DLC and life service games. 

Personally I would rather pay higher prices than dealing with those hidden fee schemes. But now that these fees are a accepted reality we will get both. Higher prices and additional fees. Yay 
 

Nintendo is probably also anticipating tariffs in the US which is why the prices are so high. If the tariffs don’t materialize, they will just cash in the offset as revenue. A win win situation.