Pretty sure Nintendo rather just lose sales than lower price. Wii U and it's games were high priced until death.
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What's up with Nintendo and pricing this last year?
- Thread starter Resilient
- Start date
Pretty sure Nintendo rather just lose sales than lower price. Wii U and it's games were high priced until death.
Right, and is there anything wrong with that? If they have something to suggest that they are making up the revenue by losing sales, are they actually making the wrong decision from their perspective? Obviously we as consumers would love lower prices for everything.
Your point being...? The Wii U was a failure for many well-established reasons by now, it wouldn't have failed any less with cheaper games.
I'm pretty sure at least one other publisher this generation could get away with this
they just won't
It's smart of them to not devalue their games. They sell to a dedicated enthusiast market.
AFAIK Nintendo do not have influence on retail prices: they decide when to discount them. Arms have been discount it several times because it is not selling that great at the momento. There is no need to that for Splatoon 2 and other games. To me I'd take any day Nintendo's pricing as it helps mantaining the value of the game over the massive discounts of PS4/XBO that hurts developers and devalúes games.
For the rest, vote with your wallet: simply do not buy these games or purchase them secomd hand if you want them. In Europe you can buy new games in Spain -where I am from-
for around 50-55, it is truly great.
Absolutely disagree. One huge problem with the modern industry is the massive devaluation of games -this is why you get DLCs, microtransactions and all that stuff, to make up for the devaluation-: in one month it is like 40$, which is absolutely crazy and harms the industry badly. These games went on sale because of the consumption patterns of PS4/XBO owners: they did not purchase the game at launch and wait for a Price drop, thus reducing revenue from devs and creating negative effects in the form of externalities.
It is not a greedy move: retailers can discount them if they want, but there is no need since they are selling. Ever oasis flop, and was discounted quickly. No need for Zelda BOTW because it is still a top seller. Games selling at full Price is great for developers, it helps costumers perceive there is value. Games floping and being 20$ in 2 months is terrible.
I feel like some people in Era and Reddit often forget that the world outside the US doesn't have the "always $60".
Their prices otuside the US are stupid. Switch games in Mexico are $80 usd. PS4 and Xbox games are ~$60, some cheaper. You guys say there is "no Nintendo tax" but I see something else here, and have seen for this whole generation (I know God of War says another price but that "20% off" has been since the game appeared on Amazon for reasons unknown)
Eh Latamel is a different kind of beast. A shitty one. The price at Amazon MX lowers a bit after release tho
I don't think I need to read an interview to point out that Nintendo being a "particularly money-driven organization" is something that is not unique to them in video games and, dare I say, in all of commerce.
I absolutely agree. And it ultimately means that I don't buy as many Switch games. Other publishers get this. A $40, or $30 game, is an easier impulse buy for many of us than a $60 game. Some of the pricing on the Switch is just crazy. Why would I buy Doom on Switch for $60 when it's been as low as $15 on the other platforms? Who thinks Breath of the Wild is worth $60 14 months after it came out, when Horizon is like $20? Wii U ports, $60? Other publishers, like Sony, charge $50 or even $40 for major remasters like Shadow of the Colossus or Final Fantasy XII, and they are discounted within a few months. Even megahits like Destiny 2 or Call of Duty, which outsold any Switch game, hits the bargain bin 6 months after launch.
However, Nintendo doesn't make the big margins on post-launch content and services that the other publishers do, so they are kind of stuck with this outdated model.
Anyway, best to buy Switch games secondhand until Nintendo brings their pricing more in-line with the rest of the industry.
Why does Nintendo do this in the US?
https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames/ref=sv_vg_12
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2018/videogames/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsar
That's why
https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames/ref=sv_vg_12
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2018/videogames/ref=zg_bs_tab_t_bsar
That's why
Old games dropping in price has happened since the dawn of gaming, it is not the reason for DLC etc (which Nintendo's full price games also have...).
Retailers cannot just discount however they like without major losses unless got a prior agreement with publishers. Is why Wii U prices never dropped despite terrible sales.
The market. Considering BotW hasn't left NPD since March, 2017 and Horizon left it many months ago. And a price drop to $20-$30 couldn't even stop this.
This might be frustrating to accept, but your perceived value of some of these games doesn't match up with reality.
Edit - I gotta' be fair here. NPD is revenue-based, so Horizon's large price drops would have an affect on its chart placement. With that said, it dropped off the list long before it received steep price cuts, so my point stands.
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As for the rest of the post, I don't think you understand why games drop in price.
Horizon HAS to drop it's price to stay relevant as more AAA PS4 games comes out, Horizon was a standout of a very competitive 2017. 2018 is all about Spider-Man and God of War, people aren't thinking about Horizon as much. Breath of the Wild will be the top Switch recommendation it's entire run. It won't get overshadowed until the next Zelda. You'll get the occasional deals for $47, but until it becomes a Nintendo Select in 5 years, there's literally no reason to drop the price other than, "well because ".
Same logic with Wolfenstein 2. It released with lots of competition, got overshadowed so they dropped the price to make it seem more attractive, not because it wasn't worth $60.
The short answer is that the market can bear it.
But this was also something that we saw coming when the rumblings began that the NX would be a hybrid system. Dedicated Nintendo players are paying more across the board because everything has been bumped up from the $40 price point on the 3DS (even dual-platform releases like the forthcoming Sushi Striker have been nudged up to $50). I think many of us optimistically hoped that the experiments with non-standard software pricing on the Wii U for DKCTF, Captain Toad, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, and Splatoon (all games with varying extents of content or strict single- or multiplayer focus, which software buyers might have seen as risks) would last, but now it looks conclusive that the dream is dead.
That's for launch-day MSRPs, of course. The expectation that everything should be cheaper with time, and that games must be marked down by 50% after a year or so, is a standard to which Nintendo has never subscribed (apart from Player's Choice selections doled out years after release) because their software has gotten along just fine without it. If you are able to control pricing, as they do with their first-party catalogue, it's in your interest to cultivate expectations that sales are never steep and discounts don't happen quickly, so as to send the message that if you want to buy the title, you might as well pick it up now. And it's a practice bolstered by the fact that Nintendo software has traditionally held its value very well on the secondary-market and even used titles are barely marked down instead of winding up in the bargain bin.
There's no incentive for Nintendo to price software like the competition when the competition doesn't have access to their library. What would they get out of it? A larger install base? In circumstances where that matters, for building momentum behind an IP, we see that they are more aggressive about digital discounts (see: Arms).
We all want to pay less for more, but the notion that games should naturally depreciate with age is ridiculous. I don't pay more for big-budget blockbusters with huge production values at the cinema than I do for small, intimate independent productions or restorations of repertory classics (often quite the opposite, in fact). If your expectations for game pricing are aligned with production values and the newness of the tech, I'm not sure why you're buying into a Nintendo platform in the first place.
And for the record, I'm somewhat grumpy myself about the lack of library carry-over for double-dippers (as is the norm on PC where the developers rarely need to invest in updates for forward-compatible support), the encroachment of subscription fees for online play, the "cartridge tax", the pricing of late third-party ports, and the fact that Nintendo's DLC pricing has settled on somewhat higher price points than what looked so promising about MK8. I'm not excusing any of that. But asking Nintendo to devalue their own product by joining a time-sensitive race to the bottom based on how long software has been on the market is entirely the wrong solution.
But this was also something that we saw coming when the rumblings began that the NX would be a hybrid system. Dedicated Nintendo players are paying more across the board because everything has been bumped up from the $40 price point on the 3DS (even dual-platform releases like the forthcoming Sushi Striker have been nudged up to $50). I think many of us optimistically hoped that the experiments with non-standard software pricing on the Wii U for DKCTF, Captain Toad, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, and Splatoon (all games with varying extents of content or strict single- or multiplayer focus, which software buyers might have seen as risks) would last, but now it looks conclusive that the dream is dead.
That's for launch-day MSRPs, of course. The expectation that everything should be cheaper with time, and that games must be marked down by 50% after a year or so, is a standard to which Nintendo has never subscribed (apart from Player's Choice selections doled out years after release) because their software has gotten along just fine without it. If you are able to control pricing, as they do with their first-party catalogue, it's in your interest to cultivate expectations that sales are never steep and discounts don't happen quickly, so as to send the message that if you want to buy the title, you might as well pick it up now. And it's a practice bolstered by the fact that Nintendo software has traditionally held its value very well on the secondary-market and even used titles are barely marked down instead of winding up in the bargain bin.
There's no incentive for Nintendo to price software like the competition when the competition doesn't have access to their library. What would they get out of it? A larger install base? In circumstances where that matters, for building momentum behind an IP, we see that they are more aggressive about digital discounts (see: Arms).
We all want to pay less for more, but the notion that games should naturally depreciate with age is ridiculous. I don't pay more for big-budget blockbusters with huge production values at the cinema than I do for small, intimate independent productions or restorations of repertory classics (often quite the opposite, in fact). If your expectations for game pricing are aligned with production values and the newness of the tech, I'm not sure why you're buying into a Nintendo platform in the first place.
And for the record, I'm somewhat grumpy myself about the lack of library carry-over for double-dippers (as is the norm on PC where the developers rarely need to invest in updates for forward-compatible support), the encroachment of subscription fees for online play, the "cartridge tax", the pricing of late third-party ports, and the fact that Nintendo's DLC pricing has settled on somewhat higher price points than what looked so promising about MK8. I'm not excusing any of that. But asking Nintendo to devalue their own product by joining a time-sensitive race to the bottom based on how long software has been on the market is entirely the wrong solution.
Seeing how Breath of the Wild sold almost 3 million units in the last 3 months, why would you think it needs to be lower. You compared it to Horizon, which is heavily discounted now. Is that pushing 10 million units sold? And is it is which one made more money for the publisher.
Call of duty gets discounted because after six months, you may as well wait until the next one comes out in 5 months lol. People still buy call of duty in full price in droves every year despite knowing that it'll be dirt cheap in 8 months. Just like tons of people buy Mortal Kombat/Injustice with the season pass for 90-100 bucks day one knowing that I'm 9-10 months it'll be a stand alone package of everything for 60. Generally with Nintendo franchises, you don't see a second until 3-5 years later, and sometimes only one iteration per generation. So it has a huge value proposition.
You mentioned the second hand market. Yo can generally buy a Nintendo game day one, play it, finish it and sell it getting 75% of your money back, thanks to the value never going down. So in the end you spent 15 dollars. So there are ways to circumvent the costs.
GTAV has been among the year's top sellers for the past several years but it has seen many sales. So I don't buy this. Yes, games that are successful drop price more slowly, but if you even look at a game like COD: WW2 that was a tremendous seller, it was on sale a month after launch for $35... these games will stay relevant for months or, in the case of GTA, for years and years.
See above.
The end result of not dropping price is that it hurts the value of the system for consumers, no question. You can grab a PS4 or an Xbox today and pick up a very nice library of discounted AAA games along with it, even fairly recent games like Monster Hunter World or Far Cry 5. That's not so with the Switch. And look, I'm not opposed to spending $60 on games when they launch, I spent $60 on Breath of the Wild last year not too long after it came out and that was fine, but it's been a year already and that game's contemporaries are heavily discounted... this is an issue that's specific to Nintendo, I can't think of another publisher with this kind of pricing model in 2018.
It's not just the last year; Nintendo pricing has been absurd since like forever.
Nintendo pricing is one of the biggest reasons I haven't bought a Switch. I'm tired of spending way more money on Nintendo stuff and getting less entertainment value than I get from PlayStation.
Nintendo pricing is one of the biggest reasons I haven't bought a Switch. I'm tired of spending way more money on Nintendo stuff and getting less entertainment value than I get from PlayStation.
Yep. I buy with GCU discount and sell after beating for nearly every game I buy (that has a physical option). I'm rarely out more than $10-15 regardless of whether it's some multiplat I bought awith GCU after it hit $30 or 40 or a Nintendo game at $60 (since the hold value).
It's an interview which talks about them in comparison to other Japanese companies.
GTA is an interesting example. Considering the game makes most of its revenue through GTA Online microtransactions, it's in Take 2's best interest to make the initial buy-in as comfortable for consumers as possible. I'm actually kind of surprised that game isn't sold for $20 more often than it is. It's usually priced at around $40. (well, I guess I'm not that surprised....it's one of the best selling video games of all time, so pricing it above $20 has clearly worked for them)
None of this changes the fact that the market has embraced BotW's pricing since day one, which is why it never leaves NPD. It's the best selling entry in series history.
Just because they physically can drop the price, doesn't mean they have to, nor is there any law or rule that they should.
GTA and Call of Duty (moreso the former since it doesn't have a yearly release) can do exactly what Nintendo's doing and would lose little to none of its sales anyway.
So just because Horizon drops in price doesn't negate the fact that Breath of the Wild is full price because other people still think it's worth full price. And they've been doing this for years. Even when I was a child who cared little for sales, I still knew that NSMBW was still pushing $50.
It's not greedy. It's just Nintendo's philosophy as a company. They don't like doing constant price drops only a year after their games come out because they feel it de-values them and makes people think these games are disposable. Whether you agree with that sentiment is up to you, but there's no underlying evil here. Nintendo games retain their original price for years because Nintendo takes its craft seriously, and wants their work top-shelf at nearly all times.
Sure, they don't have to. It's just unfortunate and unfriendly to us consumers. I'd rather buy more Nintendo titles from the retailer, not secondhand where Nintendo isn't seeing any revenue from it, or skipping NSW games where I'm on the cusp of "should I or shouldn't I"... but at current prices I simply buy fewer Switch games or buy used.
Those games will still be full price for decades. Maybe some will get a nintendo select years later but that's it. That's how they work for decades.
That statement has little weight considering Giles hasn't worked at Nintendo since the N64 days. Nintendo's always been like this. Outside of a Player's Choice/Nintendo Selects re-release, Their games stay full price for years because they don't want to de-value their games.
If that was true then they wouldn't be selling at that price.
Even consumers have their limits. Exhibit A: the Wii U.
Consider this: do you think the average bumfuck customer cares enough about price that they can accurately gauge the value of a game they never played? Why do you think everyone thinks Breath of the Wild is no longer worth $60? Because you don't? But millions do. Millions have. For years. As far as I know, Nintendo and the economy has not suffered for this in any way. And if they have, and if the audience (and I don't mean hot takes on ResetEra) decides their games aren't worth the price (Metroid: Other M as an example), then they cut the price anyway.
Sure, everyone else is more convenient, which is honestly pretty much Nintendo's existence in a nutshell, but it's not "unfriendly" to consumers that you have to pay more than you think you should, which happens to be the baseline for most games anyway.
Then do it. If you care so much about Nintendo's profits that you want to support them directly, then do it. Haggling them into lowering their prices and revenue and value (not by much, mind you, considering the publisher-retailer relationship but still) so you don't have to pay as much for an arbitrary reason is not helping them any better.
Nevermind that their games sell fuckloads whether or not you buy them anyway, because despite how many here want to cry about how Kirby and Donkey Kong aren't worth $60, they'll still sell out most of their stock.
Buy secondhand, buy used, pirate it, whatever, but telling them that they should make their work cheaper because you don't want to pay as much is not going to do anything for them.
True, but you do if you want digital (and I do as it's a handheld).
What about third party games like Rayman Legends that's twice the price of any other platform?
It's almost like a strategy works when you have a popular item to sell......
Not quite. Captain Toad is retaining the original's $40 price. And there's also games like Sushi Striker, 1-2 Switch, and Snipperclips which are sold at sub-$60 prices. Nintendo will be flexible with pricing when they need to.
That's on the publishers. Nintendo doesn't dictate the pricing for third party games.
Nintendo, even under Iwata and Yamauchi, was always driven for profit. Yamauchi ran gaming like the yakuza for absolute market control. The man was ruthless to the point of actually undermining their own dominance.
Iwata may have been a gamer and developer, but he was still very much a businessman and that is what elavated him to eventually replace Yamauchi, it wasn't his 'gamer cred' it was the fact that he pulled up HAL from the brink and righted a sinking ship. The man new how to make money and that was what moved him up the ranks. The difference now is that the CEO isn't a gamer (again) but a straight business man but everything going on now was laid out by Iwata before his passing.
Don't fall for a veneer of 'the gamer dev'.
Yep. It just is what it is. I just buy fewer of their games and more on other platforms as a result and pretty much only buy their games with GCU discount and sell faster beating (or buy used and sell after beating). Their loss. I'm a frugal, bargain shopper type person across the board and don't care about supporting corporations. I just respect the law enough to not pirate.
Okay.
One. Because it was a NEW release on the system while the other versions had been out for years. You're just losing money putting it out on a cartridge for $20.
Two. That game QUICKLY went on sale for $19.99 during the holidays.
I certainly buy less switch games than on other platforms and pricing is the main reason why. Even worse that Nintendo has set this example and even indie devs are playing this game too.
Just bought DK tropical freeze and instantly felt ripped off.
Just bought DK tropical freeze and instantly felt ripped off.
This, Nintendo is a business, no matter what their philosophy is, the end results should almost always be profits, that's the entire point. Even the "Gamer at heart" Iwata understood this.
I will never agree with the price dropping complaint. This is exactly why single player games are dying to third party publishers, it makes no sense to make a SP game that people will wait for price drops and get for 30$ instead of making a service game that will have people spending for months/years on microtransactions. Be aware of this when complaining. lol
I agree to be honest! I always think Nintendo have been massively profit driven. Doesn't seem to negatively affect the quality of their games though. But when we see Nintendo do stuff like this, it shocks me that people are surprised.
options area, Cause NoA can?? I mean other than that there is not really deep significance, but while I agree on the price hike, I found it more (inserts mean word) how people complain when Nintendo dont follow suit like others and start to sink the pricess of their games at the 1st sign of slower sales.
It would have been nice for Nintendo to at least give discounts to Wii U owners who bought the games digitally...just as a reward for loyalty/ to keep them sweet over the Wii U's early death.
If I could have bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for £19.95 digitally due to having purchased the Wii U game, I'd have double dipped.
No way am I paying full price again. Same goes for any Wii U port.
If I could have bought Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for £19.95 digitally due to having purchased the Wii U game, I'd have double dipped.
No way am I paying full price again. Same goes for any Wii U port.
Nintendo game prices are bad in the UK due to the usual never-lowering-their-prices-ever combined with there only being one game retailer over here. The retailer can get away with charging stupid amounts for games because they have no competition and use Nintendo's pricing to their advantage. Of course, you could always shop online, but your average parents buying games for their children are way more likely to shop in-store.