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episteme on 13 January 2014
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RolStoppable said:
KylieDog said:

Wii games were typically £35-40 on high street, £30-35 online. (MSRP £40-45)
WiiU games are typically £45-50 on high street, £40-45 online.  (MSRP £50)
DS games were typically £30-35 high street, £25-30 online. (MSRP £30-35)
3DS games are £35-40 high street, £30-35 online. (MSRP £40)

MSRP prices are typically not worth mentioning though, is what people were/are actually paying which is what matters.  MSRPs raised £5 for some more popular titles, like Mario or Zelda though retail wouldn't always reflect this.  Generally people are paying £5-10 more now, a 25% increase on average, that isn't small.

I'm unsure of offical console prices.  Manufacturers seem to let retail do what they want for the most part.

A 25% increase on handheld games is quite significant. In Austria/Germany DS games costed €40 and 3DS games cost €45; however, it wasn't unusual to see a €45 price tag on some of the DS games (including the popular Nintendo ones) while it's rare to see 3DS games above €45; so depending on where and how you shopped, you might have not seen a price increase at all from one generation to the next. Add to that that people in general do not value handheld games anywhere close to as high as home console games, and the price increase in the UK hurts even more. How's the pricing for Sony handhelds in the UK? Probably a similar story.

Since most of Nintendo's market in Europe uses €, the situation is probably very similar in other countries that use that currency. Not much of a change for pricing of the software.

Another factor that came to my mind when looking at top 10/20/40 charts across Europe is that Xbox is only really popular in the UK, meaning that 360 (and now also One) entries have a much higher chance to push other software down the charts than anywhere else in Europe. That skews the picture when just looking at rankings.

As for Wii U software prices, they have gone up by €10 on average, so not too different from the UK. Hard to say what makes the Wii U do comparitively worse in the UK than in the rest of Europe. Perhaps the Wii U hardware is priced outrageously in the UK (in comparison to what the Wii costed).


Importing 3DS and Wii U games from the UK is usually around 30% cheaper than buying them in Germany.

I pre-ordered 3D World, Tropical Freeze, Mario Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2 for less than 33 Pounds.

Most first party 3DS games cost 34,99-39,99 Euros in Germany, the only 3DS game I saw at 44,99 was Bravely Default.