Why Are Switch Games So Expensive

When The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword launched on the Nintendo Wii in 2011, the motion control adventure cost $49.99. This week, Nintendo announced a remake of the game for Switch: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, priced at $59.99, adding a dollar to the price tag for each year that has passed since the game was released. Original game released. a quiet resignation sigh. Skyward Sword, a 10-year-old Wii game, is more expensive than when it first launched a decade ago – and it will continue to be expensive, because first-party Nintendo Switch games are barely never been discounted. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a version of the Nintendo Wii U game released in 2017, is still on sale for full price nearly 4 years later. So does Super Mario Odyssey, as well as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Party and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe. In fact, it feels wrong. Nintendo’s competitors, like Sony, offer regular and permanent discounts on big-budget AAA games. God of War for PS4 launched in April 2018 for $59.99, but by October the price had been permanently lowered to just $39.99. Today, it costs less than $20. Marvel’s Spider-Man was released that same year, and received a similar $20 discount in February 2019. Xbox, PlayStation, and PC game releases often drop massive discounts the first year or so after. It’s like an industry standard practice. As buyers, we expect that, and that expectation makes Nintendo’s consistently high prices uncomfortable. Like Nintendo being exposed. Read more: Why vesper committed suicide But Nintendo wasn’t unjust. It just followed our instructions – since we wanted to pay less for the Nintendo Switch versions of the re-released Wii U games, we didn’t. We pay full price and continue to pay full price, no matter how old the game is. As usual, math and economics screw everything up. According to Nintendo’s latest financial earnings report, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold over 33 million copies since launch – giving Nintendo a staggering amount of money. And the game remains the best-selling game: It remains the fifth-best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch eShop, and to this day Amazon’s ninth-best-selling Nintendo Switch game.Who doesn’t love Mario Kart? Nintendo given that perspective, one of the PlayStation 4’s best-selling games, God of War, sold an estimated 12 million copies in June 2019 and is Amazon’s 23rd best-selling PS4 game. PlayStation had to cut prices to keep buyers interested in Kratos; Meanwhile, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has been selling in record numbers at full price since its launch. Everyone hates it. And Nintendo has no reason to lower prices – it sells more copies of its games than its competitors and makes more money on each copy sold. On social media, we bitterly joke about the “Conversion Tax” that rates modern portals of older games at a premium. We usually try to rationalize those higher prices – sure, Doom (2016) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt cost more money on Switch, but the devs had to rebuild and optimize those games to work on Nintendo’s lower supported hardware. Sometimes we have to rationalize harder: Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster is under $30 on Steam and PS4. The $20 price hike to $49.99 is the devil deal we made to play it on mobile platforms. Óscar Gutiérrez / CNETNintendo nurtured expectations for expensive games, and even though we didn’t like it, we accepted it. Consumers talked to their wallets, and Nintendo heard us loud and clear: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is $59.99, despite being an adaptation of an already established Wii game. a decade old sells for less than $10. It feels wrong, like Nintendo is being unfair – but the data doesn’t lie. We’re going to buy it anyway, and again, Nintendo’s going to print money.See more: The best Nintendo Switch controllers for 2021