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couchmonkey on 01 November 2017
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Intrinsic said:
RolStoppable said:
Quality.

Every company would love to have pricing like Nintendo, but it's usually not feasible for them because the market catches on and realizes the lack of quality. So what those other companies fall back on is DLC and microtransaction madness in the long run while upfront they offer crazy special editions to squeeze more money out of early adopters.

The same logic (quality) applies to much older games. Companies like Atari and Sega have offered mini-consoles long before Nintendo started, but the former didn't garner much attention while Nintendo's mini-consoles are scalper heaven despite having much, much, much higher supply than the counterparts from Atari and Sega.

smh...... you just can't help yourself can you?

The issue here is nintendo (not any quality nonsense as he would like to have you believe). They like every platform holder gets a cut as royalties from the sale of their games. Ifthey don't budge on their own expected cut, then no one else can cut their own prices, unless they want to give away the games for free.

In addition to that, and the second issue, is a lack of competition on nintendo platforms. Usually, the bulk of games you see on a nintendo platform only exist on a nintendo platform. If a lot of multiplatform games start making their way to the NS then nintendo will be forced to budge on their pricing. Take say Anthem for instance. If that game was on all platforms, then in around 3 months you would usually be able to find it brand new for like $40. $20 less than what it launched at on the PS4/XB1. At that point nintendo won't have a choice but to drop their own price.

So nintendo does it cause they can get away with it. They don't play when it comes to their money.

While I agree that it's not purely a quality question, Nintendo has never had to slash prices on GBA or DS games where they had great third party support, why would that change even if third party support improves significantly for Switch?

It's just a matter of making that choice to say, "I'll sacrifice a few sales in the medium term to show customers I'm not budging on price." instead of saying, "I expect a constant flow of sales which I'll achieve by constantly throwing out incentives."  The risk of option 2 is you may slowly train more and more customers to wait.

In fact, could it be the "mid-tier" of gaming was damaged by these practices during the Xbox 360 / PS3 / Wii era?  In that timeframe, I would frequently find retail shelves filled more than 60% with discount games, and many lower-selling games (maybe 20% of the shelf) were selling at $10-$20.   The "cool" answer is that online destroyed retail and physical gaming.  Sure it did, but maybe a part of the problem is that retailers became fatigued with the non-stop price drop cycle and backpedaled to a risk-averse AAA games only approach.   Now, retailers basically carry only the biggest of the big titles and most games go away after a year or two and never come back.