mountaindewslave said:
you're mistaken the majority of Wii gamers indeed were casuals or families/kids, and not a ton of users love RPG's the reality is that Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles actually are fairly uncommon compared to a lot of other Wii titles, hence their price. Skyward Sword was a late release for the Wii and based on its current playing demand it actually is somewhat scarce often Nintendo STOPS manufacturing certain popular games kind of early in a systems life cycle. examples of this would be Kid Icarus OR Zelda Ocarina of Time for the 3DS so part of this is a helping hand to the games being common uncommon and pricey based in comparison to their age. that said, when THAT many people want to play a game versus availability, supply vs. demand, it sort of justifies prices
I will also note that traditionally speaking Nintendo has much smaller libraries then some of their competitor systems in the last few generations. obviously quality games and somewhat bad selling games are going to become high priced for these systems simply because they did not sell that many copies at the get-go OR because people collecting for said systems ALL want the same games a good example of this would be Skyward Sword for the Wii or Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube. there are many like that, but those examples fall under the category of not being rare but being extremely desired for the systems they're on. the demand of those games versus the supply actually does reach an equilbrium where the price is logical
then you have games like Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii or Gotcha Force for the Gamecube where the games actually ARE fairly rare in comparison to the norm for the system
sure, part of Nintendo games prices being driven up is the rampant fanbase and the fact that their series are so engrained in culture, but another part is that they DO have a lot of games that are either uncommon or simply wanted by too many people I will mention that the same is occuring to a number of other system libaries by NON Nintendo companies/systems. the Playstation 1 library has gotten extensively expensive in terms of RPGs, fantasy, Tactical games The Sega Genesis and Saturn have also on average been rising dramatically it's nothing truly unique to Nintendo or any one platform for that matter but do understand that there is a direct correlation between RARITY OR DEMAND that has been driving up these games in the collectable video game market it's not all just imaginary and happening because Nintendo thinks it would be cool for their older stuff to be considered collectable |
What am I mistaken about? I posted a graph that shows how shortages increase equillibrium price. Hence the price of Xenoblade and The Last Story are high because their supply curves are shifted far left.
And yes, for games like Skyward Sword, which do have enough copies for a stable market the prices were arbitrarily raised by deals between Nintendo of America and retailers. Skyward Sword isn't scarce at all, atleast not in my local market and not what I've seen of the online market. There are two-three copies at about eight gamestops in my current area (<10 miles away.) In comparison the closest Xenoblade Chronicles is 15 miles away. And there are only two stores in my area (<30 miles) that have The Last Story.
If the issue for Skyward Sword is a shortage one (demand exceeds supply), as you are arguing, then the game would have had supply issues at these stores. But it does not. You can find a copy at practically every gamestop or online. Now Nintendo isn't doing anything now to keep prices arbitrarily high, as they've sold all the copies that they've produced to retailers, but they do such things when the games are new, and this affects the prices of the used market as the perceived value of said games are larger than they would've been otherwise. Nintendo knows how to drop prices slowly so that the perceived value of their titles remains quite high, and they can sell games for high costs for a long time. Other publishers think more in the short term and drop as far as they can in order to sell more copies in the short term. Nintendo can do this mostly because their games do have long-term demand and retailers know that the game will be sold eventually. Otherwise retailers wouldn't buy as large of a stock without having the power to drop the price.
The Gamestop exclusive deal was just one extreme of what Nintendo does with retailers.
