Nintendo To Start Charging $80 For First Party Titles

Itsa me! Price increase! Since the original trailer for the Switch 2 came out a couple months back Nintendo has recieved backlash from the gaming community as a whole for the whopping increases they've made to their first party games and consoles alike. In Canada the previous generation of consoles including the Switch, Switch Lite, accessories and games alike have increased in price. Other countries where the amount of money taken home from salaries is significantly less than that of first world countries will most likely struggle to justify the $80 for games and $450 for the Switch 2 console.

When it comes to the increase in price of their games it's both alarming and completely expected, Nintendo charges what they like for their products for the simple reason that they can, people still buy the games and consoles in the droves and this tells the company that they can get away with it, even if the short term sentiment is a negative one. The Switch 2 sold over 3.5 million units in the first few days of it's launch and is the fastest selling Nintendo console ever. Currently they've sold about 5.4 million units in total, that's a massive amount of good news for the higher ups at Nintendo who are most likely celebrating the sales.

Other reports state that more than 80% of Switch users purchased Mario Kart World in June, many users were lamenting at it's hefty price point prior to it releasing only for the game to utterly smash sales, pun not intented. The Mario Kart games have always sold well and are quite synonymous with the console and company itself at this point, it should come as no surprise to us that it performed as well as it did. For example Mario Kart 8 on the previous generation of consoles was owned by 45-60% of the users (Switch, WiiU), people just like to go fast it seems and that includes whipping out that debit card to make a purchase.

Needless to say however it seems that the Switch 2 is performing very well in markets worldwide and Nintendo is doing better than ever, the buyers being unimpressed with the markup on games and hardware might only make up a small vocal minority in the long run, when it comes to wanting to see change voting with your wallet is always the best thing you could do and if $80 games are a no-go then it's better to wait for sales or play something else.

When it comes to sales, first party Nintendo games barely ever get meaningful sales at all and when they do it's few and far between, we recently booted up a sale tracker to see when some of the older Pokemon games have had their prices slashed only to be greeted with a long straight line, in fact there was one bump in the entire timeline, an upwards one. Pokemon Sword increased in price in early 2020 and has remained there since. Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda and games do tend to drop in price every now and again.

These have been our thoughts on Nintendo and what's been going on in the past few months, thanks for reading and have a good day further.