Not defending Dementia Donny and either way I’m not shelling out $80 for a game ever, just wondering if this is really a result of the tariffs. I understand the console price being high due to them but I don’t see how it would affect the price of games that are essentially going to be 100% digital
Ocarina of Time cost $116.91 at launch, accounting for inflation.
Edit: the original Legend of Zelda cost $144.89 at launch, also after inflation.
Games don’t cost 90$ today for other platforms tho… even Nintendo that are a few years old still cost basically the same as at launch
They do. There are games on the PS5 store (digital ones) for more than 90 dollars. There are a few games I’ve seen upwards of 100 quid, which is about 130 dollars.
True, sure. I’m just saying the overall price of games has gone down significantly over time. An upward correction makes some sense. I’m not cheering it on, just trying to help frame the circumstances.
Competition for entertainment is higher than ever. You even have extremely good free games
An upward increase makes sense only because corporations will try to squeeze every possible cent from consumer. That’s the only justification that they need
Yes, but only accounting for inflation really doesn’t tell the whole story compared to modern games. Games are primarily sold digitally now, meanwhile when OOT released all copies were physical cartridges - and that meant significantly higher cost of manufacturing and shipping. Also, games simply didn’t sell nearly as many copies back then as they do now. Being totally real, games don’t need to be more than $60 to turn a very very good profit.
Games are also a billion dollars to produce and market nowadays. Back on SNES they were like 500k.
Cartridges cost a shitton more to make than discs, too.
I’d like to know more specifics on those numbers. Because I Found that, for example, GTAV had a marketing budget of 70-110 million, so nowhere near the billion range even for large games. With a lot of popular games like BOTW selling over 35 million copies… I don’t think the marketing cost is an issue.
Here’s one source. Just Google game development costs. This source is backed by others, it’s just the first in my search that I saw and clicked on. Games are fucking expensive to build and market. GTAV is 250m according to this article.
Edit: does this work? I saw Genshin, which I’ve never played, is actually almost a billion rn which is insane for a F2P anime game. Wild.
Skill issue
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PC gaming seems so cheap in comparison at this point doesn’t it. I guess we have better options which means there is more competition in price. Why would I spend £90 for something EA shat out when I can just not do that.
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$80 was before the tariffs…
They’re holding pre-orders due to tariffs so expect prices to increase further.
I know y’all love Nintendo, but they’re no different than any other giant corporation; greed is the reason prices go up.
This is the problem with tariffs, it’s an opportunity for greedy corporations to increase prices MORE than the tariffs or on products not covered by the tariffs and no one will be the wiser.
I doubt this is because of the recent tariffs. Nintendo is a cold calculating bastard of an old corpo they must have planned this for years.
So my assumption this isn’t caused by that but just pure greed.
No doubt they’ll jack up the price more because of orange fuckhead pissing to the wind
Well that was my point. Tariffs give greed the opportunity to metastasize in the darkness, because people expect the price to go up anyway.
After rereading your comment, I see it. My bad.
Stage 2 greedflation
Kinda sorta. Remember the pandemic? Prices went up but never came back down. I suspect the tariffs will do this as well
It’s all excuses, every greedy company does it. Take Games Workshop for example, when they switched from metal to plastic minis they said they were “forced” to increase prices “temporarily” to recover the cost of the new molds, but then Never decreased the price again, and instead just kept increasing it over time for fewer models.
Honest question because I’m OOTL, but haven’t games been this price for a long time now and weren’t Switch games even more expensive than this?
I’m a bit confused.
AAA games have been 70 bucks for a while, but I’m not sure of any base switch games that were 80 bucks. Could be wrong tho…
Okay, here’s a slightly hot take.
I’d rather the price go up and the games remain ad free and high quality (not you, pokemon, you can get fucked) than become enshittified with micro transactions, ads, etc
I don’t like it. But it’s much more acceptable to me
Okay, here’s a slightly hot take.
I’d rather the price go up and the games remain ad free and high quality (not you, pokemon, you can get fucked) than become enshittified with micro transactions, ads, etc
I don’t like it. But it’s much more acceptable to me
That’s absolutely a false dichotomy. In a world where games exist that are ad-free, high-quality and affordable, there’s absolutely no reason to believe any notion of high prices or in-game ads being a requirement for development. It’s just not true. Don’t fall for it.
Okay, fair enough. Just appreciating the lack of shit and (for something like an Animal Crossing or a BoTW quality Zelda game) I’m super happy to pay that much for a game I’ll sink hundreds of hours into, and I’d rather reward that price hike than any other form of monetization by them.
I’m real enraged by like 99% of things on the internet and in the world these days, but this pales in comparison to the rapid pace of enshittification I feel like I’ve had in virtually every other place in my life.
Still don’t love it.
Sorry bro, you get all of the above. Price go up, micro-transactions increase, more ads, and games get worse. We’re already seeing it happen, most games are overpriced and not even finished when they come out these days, and yeah, we are seeing ads in games now, especially sports games, and it seems Every game has to have a battlepass or some shit these days.
You want good games without ads or micro BS? Buy indie, play old games, and wait for the AAA industry to collapse in on itself.
I do basically only play indie games sans like, 2-3 Nintendo games per console generation. but yeah, sure feels like you get it all in the worst way
But you don’t need either. Plenty of great games are cheaper and have none of that bullshit. Rimworld, Factorio?
Nintendo just greedy, always have been, always will be. Don’t buy their trash, just emulate it.
They don’t take in the same amounts of profits as other greedy companies. Only $1.5 billion last year. Still a lot, don’t get me wrong.
I don’t care for them because of the way they gatekeep games they don’t even produce anymore, like old NES/SNES games. their anti emulation stance is pure garbage, either sell the game or fuck off when people emulate it, you don’t get it both ways.
This!
I haven’t bought a Nintendo product since the Wii. Emulate it for better frames anyway. It’s easy, and you can slap it on a steam deck or another portable.
IIRC the price was announced first, and it’s the same in other countries so I don’t think that’s the reason. Which means that lets asume they will use Japan’s tariffs of 24% on them their base price goes from 80 to 99.2, plus in the USA prices are usually pre-tax so you also add tax on top of that, this varies from state to state, but a quick Google puts it at around 5%, so you will actually be paying $104.16 for them, and $117.18 for physical copies, or $126.63 if they’re manufactured in China and you get that tariff instead. This is just one example of what these isolationist policies will cause, be prepared to have that happen to everything.
I inherited a switch from someone who wasn’t using it and was blown away by the prices for the majority of games on it. They were charging AAA prices for Mario titles. If they had priced their Mario. Zelda titles at half the price, those things would have dominated before the SteamDeck’s came out. The switch is barely used.
I’m always a few years behind on consoles and enjoy the robust secondary market, so to me, it doesn’t matter much.
Outside of Zelda and Mario Kart, there isn’t much these days that’s exclusive to Nintendo that I give a damn about anyway.
Can always play super tux kart instead
Vote with your wallet, and don’t let the FOMO pull you in.
Nintendo is just a small slice of the gaming industry. If you don’t like what you see there are other platforms and game developers.
For 80 usd you can buy a handful of bigger titles during a Steam sale. Just saying.
Based on what little I know that goes into video game development, $80 seems cheap - assuming no mtx.
But if it’s $80 + mtx? Fuck that.
I’m 100% sure that the next
FifaEA FC will cost €80 AND will have micro transactions AND people will buy it in millions of copies anywayThis is Nintendo, they make games cheap and sell for way more than it is worth. Also, with the massive increase in how Many people buy games these days, even $60 is more than enough to cover costs and have enough left over for the next game. The biggest “cost” in making games is paying the dozens of execs who do nothing all day billions of dollars.
The increased price is not the result of tariffs, neither for the games nor console. That’s pretty much confirmed by them costing the same amount (converted + sales tax) in Europe. The console is (was, before tariffs) fairly priced imo, it is comparable to the steam deck + dock.
Is 80$ Mario Kart price gouging? Eh. The edit maniac in the comments here is right that video games have become cheap, maybe even too cheap, and that a price increase at some point was inevitable. 60$ was set as the AAA price before the smartphone existed, and was not always profitable as we’ve seen with the recent lay-offs.
My own 2 cents: I’m glad some company broke that unspoken rule (we ignore skull and bones for obvious reasons), so big releases have more options in pricing, too long have we accepted 60$ games with 20$ DLC, I’m glad if this means devs can just charge 80$ for a full game. Oh, and it’s good for indie games too. People may actually buy the shorter games with worse graphics they wanted so badly a few months ago.
