| couchmonkey said: 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. |
Its not just about having "third party support", its about competition.
With your GBA and DS examples, even if tehre is a lot of third party support those games are still only found on those platforms.
Ok, look at say Doom. Imagine that game was released day and date on the NS along with the PS4/XB1 versions.
Now say sony, nintendo and MS each get $20 of the $60 from every copy of that game sold and the rest goes to the publisher and retailer. Typically, sony and MS are more willing to reduce their cut to say $10, allowing the retailers or the publishers to reduce theirs too and ultimately the game costing less. Nintendo is against such practices.
But in this example of doom, if sony and ms drops their cuts and nintendo doesn't, what you end up with is the game costing $40 on two other platforms but still costing $60 on the NS. Next thing you hear is that games cost more on the NS than they do anywhere else. Nintendo may ignore that if it was just the odd one or two games.... but when talking tens of hundreds of games then they have to match the other two consoles pricing model.
None of this is something they have to deal with because the games you find on nintendo platforms are usually only found on nintendo platforms.
