PSA: Mario Kart World is $50 bundled with a Switch 2, but $80 by itself
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This is what tariffs do. The U.S. version of the console will also cost $120 more than the Japanese release, and they're bringing back region locking JUST to handle the inevitable attempt to scalp some imports.
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It's "some" games, but I read that as "big games will be a half full card you can't play without a download", and tiny ones will be more or less fine. I guess that ultra fast flash is just too expensive... except no it isn't when they're jacking up the price, except yes it is because tariffs...
It's a mess is what it is and we're all caught in the middle of it.
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None of Nintendo's announced first party titles are game key cards. Bravely Default 1 & 2 and Street Fighter 6 are, and all three are significantly cheaper than $80.
(Game Key Cards are clearly labeled as such on the box.)
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Wow, Nintendo fully leapt past Ubisoft and “Quadruple A” games and pricing to AAAAAA pricing!
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Bahaha as if they could make me think they are even more laughable. And they are region locking it too to protect their exchange rate fueled profit margin. Switch cartridges are pressed in Japan. Manufactured at Japanese economic pricing and then exported.
And they want you to pay this much for nothing but plastic in a box for a digital download. There really isn't much to justify charging the same price for a download vs the infrastructure of physical manufacturing and is something I have been criticizing for ages now on PC. (30% store cut not withstanding.).
Paying for all that and then making everything in the box useless ?
90$ for shitty controllers that probably still use cheap carbon contacts that wear out fast?
Hysterical. Absolutely bananas.
And they want you to pay this much for nothing but plastic in a box for a digital download. There really isn't much to justify charging the same price for a download vs the infrastructure of physical manufacturing and is something I have been criticizing for ages now on PC. (30% store cut not withstanding.).
Paying for all that and then making everything in the box useless ?
90$ for shitty controllers that probably still use cheap carbon contacts that wear out fast?
Hysterical. Absolutely bananas.
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I imagine not much. Nintendo has really done an incredible job building it's corner of the gaming landscape. It has Nintendo only fans, and it's everyone else's secondary device. You can pick a Nintendo game at random and odds are you are getting an 8/10 or better experience. Nintendo's moat is that no one has the same high consistency for producing fun well designed games.
You can't legally get a Nintendo game on a Steam Deck, which makes them more likely to be desk mates than competitors. Unless Nintendo really Wii U's the Switch 2, it's probably not going to sweat the Steam Deck.
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As a former life long Nintendo fan, this will be the first console I won't touch. Nintendo has pissed me off with the number of lawsuits or threat of lawsuits over the last 6+ years that for me it is a perma ban. They won't get a single dime from me ever again. Either from buying a console, buying a game, buying merch (Shirts or whatever.) or even seeing a Zelda or Mario movie. NOTHING. They are making money hand over fist. They want to be lawsuit happy asses? Fine. Will they give a single crap? Nope. For every person like me there are probably 500,000 people lining up to get a console on day one.
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I'm not a Switch owner, and I won't pretend I was likely to buy a Switch 2, so I know my opinion isn't worth much here but... at $80+ per game I would basically be priced out of the console anyway. It's not worth buying a console where I'd be able to afford maybe two games a year? That's not cost effective.
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I know it's hard to defend higher prices, since we're all the ones paying them, but: $50 in 1985 money was a typical price for a new console video game. $50 or $60 in 1995 money was a typical price for a new console game. Now, it's 2025, and the acceptable "sigh, if you must" price for a top-end, biggest-budget video game is... $60 in 2025 money. And that's alongside lower-budget games that regularly go for $5-$20.
That's just... wild. I can't think of another industry where consumer prices just stay flat over 40 years of inflation. Adjusted for inflation, 1985 games used to cost $150 in today's money. That $60 we spend now as the maximum would've gotten you just $20 back then--not even halfway to that new NES game. And in the meantime, development costs have ballooned, to the point where some productions cost more than blockbuster films. The gaming audience has expanded considerably, too, of course, but there's only so much that can offset the dev costs, especially since reaching larger global audiences requires extra localization expenses (if you're doing it right).
We're all drowning in choice and have a backlog a mile long, and if an $80 price tag gives you reason to reconsider curling up with something cheaper or already in your library... I get it, I'm right there with you. But the facts are that games in 2025 cost the least to purchase and (sometimes) the most to produce that they've ever cost. If premium-budget titles like Nintendo first-party offerings or whammo-blammo AAA 200-hour open-worlders are renormalizing to $80 price points or higher, that's... That's just economics. We're fortunate they stayed so low for so long.
That's just... wild. I can't think of another industry where consumer prices just stay flat over 40 years of inflation. Adjusted for inflation, 1985 games used to cost $150 in today's money. That $60 we spend now as the maximum would've gotten you just $20 back then--not even halfway to that new NES game. And in the meantime, development costs have ballooned, to the point where some productions cost more than blockbuster films. The gaming audience has expanded considerably, too, of course, but there's only so much that can offset the dev costs, especially since reaching larger global audiences requires extra localization expenses (if you're doing it right).
We're all drowning in choice and have a backlog a mile long, and if an $80 price tag gives you reason to reconsider curling up with something cheaper or already in your library... I get it, I'm right there with you. But the facts are that games in 2025 cost the least to purchase and (sometimes) the most to produce that they've ever cost. If premium-budget titles like Nintendo first-party offerings or whammo-blammo AAA 200-hour open-worlders are renormalizing to $80 price points or higher, that's... That's just economics. We're fortunate they stayed so low for so long.
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As another FLLNF, I was pushed away when Nintendo stopped focusing on producing fun, well-designed experiences.
Part of the problem was how hacked the Wii and DS were. As a result, they created incredibly clumsy counter-measures for Wii U and 3DS which were eventually broken but left legitimate customers such as myself out to dry. You COULD store data on an external HDD for the Wii U but if key parts of the system were replaced when your system was serviced, the data would be rendered useless. Ever lost hundreds of hours of save data as a result of Nintendo's horrid technical deficiencies? I did. Did I get so much as an apology note? No. Was I ever able to recover the free holiday costumes they distributed for Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper? No.
Nintendo then chased every poor decision and bandwagon they could find.
Oh! Everyone's releasing slipshod titles and simply patching. Let's do that, too!
Oh! Everyone's releasing absurd amounts of DLC. Let's do that, too!
Oh! Everyone's doing Toys to Life. Let's do that, too but in a vastly inferior way that negatively impacts the actual titles!
Oh! Everyone's charging for online play. Let's do that, too but instead of having newer titles as incentives, we'll loan out dog-eared NES titles!
Oh! Everyone lets users backup data locally. Let's not do that but make it a cloud-only feature and tie it to NSO to boost sales because otherwise it's a complete waste of money and also not support every title while we're at it!
They treated their western audience particularly poorly. Fire Emblem was held by dedicated fans in high regard and Nintendo took advantage of that. They made it seem that if sales were not...stupendous...then they would simply not release any further FE titles in the west, which galvanised fans into purchasing those intensely DLC-laden carts. Fates, they even had the gall to split into two carts but then there was still a third DLC scenario to rent (unless you found the rare but still incomplete SE).
So by the time switch plopped out, they really couldn't be bothered to try anymore. You will notice there is significant overlap between the Wii U and switch first party libraries.
Still, no matter what, there are always people who forgive their current sins because of their legacy. I admit that it is a sterling legacy full of incredible titles.
This...is no longer true.Shigeru Miyamoto said:
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I almost exclusively bought physical switch carts for the kids as it meant not having to deal with Nintendo's crappy sharing system. Whoever had the cart was able to play the game, regardless of location or internet access.
My son lost interest in his switch during the pandemic when I cobbled together a second PC for them to use on the telly. He got an OLED deck a couple of chrimbos ago and has been happy going through my steam library (doubly so since valve improved family sharing a while back). Steam sales and various bundle sites rule.
My daughter's still very much switch-focused, and was unimpressed at the pricing announced this morning.
To get to the plot: I do reckon that Nintendo should consistently discount the digital copies versus physical carts. They should pass the lack of manufacturing costs and lower distribution costs for games sold directly from their online store. All of the console manufacturers have been trying to hasten the demise of physical copies for a long time now, and the quickest way to normalise it would be with a discount.
Hell, I suppose that might happen here anyway; Japan's looking at a 24% tariff. I'm kind of expecting digital copies of software to be exempt as there's no manufacturing involved.
As for the $80 price point, as others have pointed out, with inflation $60 could easily have become $80 already; it's mainly that switch 1 titles were held to the "old" price that makes the jump especially jarring. Higher prices always suck, and Nintendo is doubly bad given how they maintain prices over time, but I'm wondering if it couldn't be way worse.
I suppose I should also draw from the perspective of one of my best mates when I was at the end of high school & into Uni. They were better off than we were, and they got a lot of SNES imports, often paying a stupid premium to get them early. I believe he paid £60 for the secret of mana in 1993; the bank of england's inflation calculator puts that at a ludicrous £127 in today's money.
My son lost interest in his switch during the pandemic when I cobbled together a second PC for them to use on the telly. He got an OLED deck a couple of chrimbos ago and has been happy going through my steam library (doubly so since valve improved family sharing a while back). Steam sales and various bundle sites rule.
My daughter's still very much switch-focused, and was unimpressed at the pricing announced this morning.
To get to the plot: I do reckon that Nintendo should consistently discount the digital copies versus physical carts. They should pass the lack of manufacturing costs and lower distribution costs for games sold directly from their online store. All of the console manufacturers have been trying to hasten the demise of physical copies for a long time now, and the quickest way to normalise it would be with a discount.
Hell, I suppose that might happen here anyway; Japan's looking at a 24% tariff. I'm kind of expecting digital copies of software to be exempt as there's no manufacturing involved.
As for the $80 price point, as others have pointed out, with inflation $60 could easily have become $80 already; it's mainly that switch 1 titles were held to the "old" price that makes the jump especially jarring. Higher prices always suck, and Nintendo is doubly bad given how they maintain prices over time, but I'm wondering if it couldn't be way worse.
I suppose I should also draw from the perspective of one of my best mates when I was at the end of high school & into Uni. They were better off than we were, and they got a lot of SNES imports, often paying a stupid premium to get them early. I believe he paid £60 for the secret of mana in 1993; the bank of england's inflation calculator puts that at a ludicrous £127 in today's money.
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Nazonohito
Ars Centurion
Sadly, this isn't even the worst of Nintendo's greed.
In Japan, the Japanese-language-only, region-locked version *of the Switch 2 is priced at 49,980 yen.
But if you want to play any first-party games not purchased in Japan, or use the system/games in any language other than Japanese - you must buy the "international version" *of the Switch 2... which is conveniently priced at only 69,980 yen.
Since the only real difference between the two versions is in artificially locked language and region settings, it's basically just a 40% foreigner tax. Pretty shitty move on their part, and between that and the increased game prices it ensures I am done ever buying their games/consoles.
(*edited for clarity.)
In Japan, the Japanese-language-only, region-locked version *of the Switch 2 is priced at 49,980 yen.
But if you want to play any first-party games not purchased in Japan, or use the system/games in any language other than Japanese - you must buy the "international version" *of the Switch 2... which is conveniently priced at only 69,980 yen.
Since the only real difference between the two versions is in artificially locked language and region settings, it's basically just a 40% foreigner tax. Pretty shitty move on their part, and between that and the increased game prices it ensures I am done ever buying their games/consoles.
(*edited for clarity.)
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Don't make disingenuous comparisons to a time when 1) media costs from cartridges made up a big portion of the cost of each game, 2) there was no such thing as cheap digital distribution, 3) the total addressable market was much smaller.
If you can't think of another industry where consumer prices have stayed flat or even fallen over 40 years then maybe you're not thinking hard enough. Hint: How about the machine you used to type and send your message?
A lot of the ballooning of costs AAA development you cite are due to the immense amount of labor and resources needed to chase realism (photo-realistic assets and other world mimicking stuffs), paying A-list actors to appear in the actual games, bloated marketing budgets (having celebs hawking games on TV), and licensing music or other media for use in-game or marketing.
Nobody can accuse Nintendo of throwing money after those modern fads. You don't have to look far to see examples of their low grade slop. Their annual "FIFA" release, aka Pokemon, never looks like they've spent much on it but they always ask for full price.
Mario Kart 8 on Switch, which itself is a port of a WiiU game, added 67 million copies sold. The amount of revenue it pulled in is within the $4-5 billion range for an old game which had already sold 8 million copies.
Other titles like the big pandemic hit Animal Crossing New Horizons is sitting at over $2 billion in revenue. Smash Ultimate which I don't think has ever once gone on sale in 6 years is also over $2 billion from box sales alone before DLC and seasonal passes. Now think about the Pokemon releases which get doubled up with two versions and have DLC and battle passes on top of that.
They make plenty of money in fact they already have better margins than the other game companies. Also ask yourself why a company with most of its development workforce in Japan (who are paid in yen when the yen is weakening) needs to raise prices outside of Japan. This isn't about surviving. (See the post above mine with the pricing for the region locked and unlocked games.) It's about padding their own numbers.
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Nazonohito
Ars Centurion
Just a small point of clarification... My post was about the console pricing for locked vs. unlocked (in domestic JP prices that'd essentially be like if US consoles were priced at $500 and $700 respectively). Was honestly so put off by that I haven't even looked at the game prices in yen.
I've also edited my original post to be more accurate.
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Except the EU version is €469, which is even crazier and there are no tariffs there.
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This has been addressed a lot already in the thread. I can't think of many other markets that have expanded as much as the video game market over 40 years, so that's why prices have stayed mostly flat. Even at $60 (or less) games make many times as much now as they did 40 years ago. The only reason there is a "crisis" in the industry is because AAA titles have reached absurd costs (for marginal gains in value) - not unlike movies - where a single dud can almost sink your company.
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I dont think thats entirely true. gonna quote a few users from reddit (jariesuicune, mixeygoat and niibuyaa to be exact )
"Language-lock is absolutely not the same as Region-lock. ..
All systems will still play all games from all regions. The only difference will be that if a person has a Japanese-edition, their system will only support access to the Japanese e-shop. "
"If it has an in-game language option it will still work, only the games that follow the system language are stuck in Japanese"
Also the global version is more in line with global prices while "The goal of this region locked price (version) is to prevent people from importing Japanese consoles to the US, while making it affordable for Japanese people. " （albeit with decreased functionality）
You think of it as a tax and greed, but i think of it as a discount for their own home market specially with currency exchanges its a way of keeping things affordable for their own market. Dont get me wrong, I've worked for long times in Japan and it wouldnt exactly be great for me if I wanted one when im there since I'd prefer a global version (which lets be honest people like me are the minority there) but I totally get what they're going for seeing as how a good chunk of sales were from there and alienating their own market doesnt make sense.
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Yeah, but if you have a $100M development budget, you need 2 million sales just to break even. Marginal costs don't kick in until after that. GTA is at least a $500M budget.
So while the marginal costs haven't kept up with inflation (in fact they've gone down as we moved from physical to digital media) if you told a game dev in 1990 that games would have a a half billion dollar development budget they'd think you're insane. Original Legend of Zelda broke records for development budget of just over $1M. TOTK was estimated to be 100x that.
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Nintendo is being shady and completely milking the popularity of the device. I for one won’t be paying $80 for a game! No spank you!
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Australia seems to have got off lightly.
It's AU$699 here, which includes sales tax. Without tax, it's AU$635.
That's US$399 ex-tax, which is quite reasonable.
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I'm gonna be blunt. That's their effing problem.
If game companies want AAA titles to mimic Hollywood movies where the income is amazing on hits, but a single dud can sink your company that's their choice. And raising the prices on individual copies will not help because a dud will still sink you.
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How can you rationalize $90 for a physical copy of a game doesn't even contain the game on the card.
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Easy.
A) It isn't $90 in the US, it is in the EU.
B) Mario Kart World isn't a key card - it's a full physical release that does include the full game.
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I feel like we're at the point that they'll be telling us to just eat cake because the bread has gotten too expensive.
If only there was something that kept prices reasonable and wages competitive.
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This is the part I don't quite understand. I was way more surprised that the $60 price point held as long as it did and so I'm really sharing in the outrage. The NES was $180 at launch ($520 today) and Legend of Zelda was $50 ($110 today).
And you get way more bang for your buck out of a video game today than you did 40 years ago. The first-party titles I bought for Switch (Odyssey, BoTW, ToTK, Wonder, MarioKart) were all more than worth every dime considering the time I've spent playing them. Not to mention all the time I've spend playing the emulated games.
I'm eligible for the insider pre-order and fully intend to take advantage of it. With one of those GameCube controllers if they're available because I've been dying to have the chance to play Wind Waker again.
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Nazonohito
Ars Centurion
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
Since many 1st-party Switch 2 games will only be digital downloads (even many "physical" copies will just be cards with a download code), and JP-locked consoles can only access the JP e-shop, that essentially serves as a de facto region lock for the JP Switch 2s.
Given that, I'd also be pretty willing to wager that any domestically sold 1st-party games will probably be set to "system language" only - to ensure that anyone buying the cheaper version will be unable to play games in anything other than 日本語. Perhaps 3rd-party games will have more flexibility - but no one who buys Nintendo does so for the 3rd-party games. It's all about access to Nintendo's proprietary IP.
So while it may not be a literal region lock, it definitely is intended to serve as such.
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The key card thing is weird... conceptually kind of get it, but if you're going to allow that, you should probably just allow people to trade licenses? pay a $20 premium for a tradable license? 20 years from now is the Switch shop still going to be live to download from for someone who waded through two feet of water to buy a key card in a Florida pawn shop?
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While some of the old eShops might not be active anymore the content servers for most of the systems are still up as far as I know. If you have the license I believe most of the Nintendo systems will still be able to redownload the game despite the shop technically being offline now.
The key card thing isn't actually new to Switch 2, BTW. There were some card releases for Switch 1 that were just physical download tokens.
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Any person that love Nintendo product, will pay more than any other products regardless all technical differences, finding excuses from them don't wasting timr.
And any person that not not in love with Nintendo ecosystem will find any excuses to denied all Nintendo reason. Don't wasting time confince them
Now we are in age of decisions base on ecosystem that we know within generations. Right now many youngster know Nintendo from their parents. But many of their parents known Nintendo from first experience (1st buyer).
In future become more harder for Nintendo to hold this because 3rd generation are more likely phone and maybe other gadget ecosystem dominating their live.
And any person that not not in love with Nintendo ecosystem will find any excuses to denied all Nintendo reason. Don't wasting time confince them
Now we are in age of decisions base on ecosystem that we know within generations. Right now many youngster know Nintendo from their parents. But many of their parents known Nintendo from first experience (1st buyer).
In future become more harder for Nintendo to hold this because 3rd generation are more likely phone and maybe other gadget ecosystem dominating their live.
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If I had to speculate on what a game-key card officially is within the ecosystem my guess would be it's a very small last generation SD-based card, and the only reason it wouldn't work in a Switch 1 is the content on it isn't compatible. There'd be little reason to waste a PCIe-based Express card on something like this.
This is probably being offered as a way of having brick and mortar product that is less impacted by tariffs because it's much cheaper to produce. Luckily they're enforcing labeling that makes the difference clear.
This is probably being offered as a way of having brick and mortar product that is less impacted by tariffs because it's much cheaper to produce. Luckily they're enforcing labeling that makes the difference clear.
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Honestly, the Japanese-only edition of the Switch is Nintendo doing its best to help Japanese players in a very difficult economic situation. While the value of the Yen has sunk, Japan has been incredibly resistant to inflation. Yen prices have gone up a bit, but in Dollars or Euros everything is much cheaper now. Unfortunately, this includes wages.
The result is that Japan is living in a little isolated bubble where life can mostly go on domestically, but imported products are prohibitively expensive. If the Switch 2 were priced in line with the rest of the world, no one in Japan could afford it. But if Nintendo simply charged less for it, grey exporters would strip the japanese supply bare.
So they applied a quite clever "soft region lock": make it support the Japanese language only. That's exactly what 99% of domestic players want anyway, while making it unattractive to 99% of foreign players.
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Yeah, that's not unreasonable I think. But it puts it within some interesting striking distance.
Same price as a 1TB White Series X https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/xbox-series-x-1tb-digital-console-robot-white and $150 more than the Series S.
$25 less than a PS5 Slim with Astro bot https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/ps5-playstation-5-slim-console-astro-bot-bundle
I know, different markets in a lot of ways. But certainly no longer a cheaper console, very much same price league.
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Personally, I'll be avoiding these "key" cartridges because one of the reasons I go physical is for preservation reasons. Nintendo has rarely been one for day-one patches, so what you get on the cartridge is a working game. If the digital store goes down in ten years' time, the base game will still work just fine even without needing to search for update files online.
But there are many people who just like physical cartridges because they can pass them around. Give it to your sibling to play on their Switch. Let your cousin borrow it. On-sell it when you're done with it. All without any fuss with digital store-fronts. The "key card" still works for all of this, and is likely very cheap to produce. So there's some merit to the idea.
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The market has grown by leaps and bounds. They used to sell tens of thousands of copies, now they can sell tens of millions. Big game franchises can make billions of dollars.
There's no need for prices to go up, especially with digital copies, which cost fractions of a cent to "manufacture". They're raising prices because they can, not because they need to.
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It's also gone from a handful of people in an office park making games for a few thousand bucks to well-into-8/9-figure productions and half that again in marketing.
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