What makes the average Nintendo game hold its value so well compared to other console games

[Normchacho]

RolStoppable said:

Normchacho said:

It's really not. I actually don't see how that's much of a hurdle at all. People buying Nintendo hardware already know what they're getting. If anything, because Nintendo has stick so faithfully to it's style people are largely willing to buy their systems based on the expectation that they'll keep making games like they have in the past. Besides that, having to also sell the hardware (a goal of all exclusive content) isn't going to have any effect on the pricing structure of the software.

Competition would drive down the price of software, little else.

It is a bigger hurdle. Just look at Sony's first party software sales. The increased competition from other games on the PS4 helps Sony to sell more software as opposed to the Vita where the absence of competition crippled hardware sales on the whole and consequently took down first party software sales with it.

Applying the above to Nintendo, increased competition from other worthwhile games would raise Nintendo's hardware sales and thus Nintendo software would sell more than before. And when it sells more, there's even less of an incentive to drop the price of software. That's why the argument "Nintendo games can sell well at high prices for long periods of time because there's little to no competition" is flawed.

There has to be a strong correlation between value and quality, otherwise it would never work to maintain high prices for an extended period of time. Several people in this thread have argued that the quality of the games has nothing to do with it, but they are all wrong. Without quality there's no value, and without value there will be no sales. People have harped on the outliers, but that's nothing more than cherry-picking when the thread title asks why the average Nintendo game holds its value so well.

But you can't apply the first paragraph to Nintendo, they don't work like that. Nobody is buying a Nintendo system to play lesser ports of old third party games, they're buying them for Nintendo games. A Nintendo gamer is going to pay whatever Nintendo wants to charge for their games because they don't have a choice. Somoene can own an Xbox and get plenty of value out of it without ever touching a Microsoft game, same goes for Playstation. If you own a Nintendo console and you don't buy any Nintendo games you bought what is very nearly an expensive paper weight.

The question being posed in the thread isn't "Does Nintendo make good games?" It's "Why do Nintendo games stay so expensive?"