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Biggerboat1 on 31 May 2018
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DonFerrari said:

Biggerboat1 said:
Just to chip in here - first off I don't have any difficulty in believing that GOW cost significantly more than Labo to develop.

There are however other considerations, such as the shelf space taken by Labo. The retailer may demand a larger profit than they would for a game which takes up a fraction of the space. So we don't know how much of that extra 20 dollars (if we're saying that a reasonable price is the standard game price of 60) is actually going to Nintendo. The distribution will also likely be more expensive.

I mean, the PSVR Aim controller is $65 on it's own, without a game - do you honestly think it's costing Sony any where near that to manufacture...?

1) Consoles do take more space and have almost 0 profit margin.

2) And Accessories all have very overpriced history (no controller cost over 15 bucks to make but retail for 60... X1 pro controller is almost obscene).

3) Skylander also uses a lot of shelf-space but I never saw it hitting this high (which would also be obscene). And I don't think Nintendo is giving the store 50 USD of margin.

1) If that's true then I'm guessing that they're only selling them due to the profit that will come from any additional games bought with the console - that strategy obviously doesn't apply to Labo - if they weren't making decent profit on it, they simply wouldn't stock it, & since it takes up considerably more room (on the shop floor & in the stock room), I'm guessing they'll want a higher profit than a 60 dollar game...

2) Well, isn't Labo sort of an accessory? Albeit with software included... If so, and all accessories are overpriced, then it's just following the trend. Not that that would necessarily justify it's price, but it would change the overall argument to "Accessories are a huge ripoff", rather than "Labo is a huge ripoff"

3) I'm not familiar with Skylander products so can't speak to potential production / R&D / marketing costs or the size of it's packaging compared to Labo...

I'm not a Labo evangelist by any means - at the time of it's launch I thought that $80 was a bit high for the market & that $60 would have been a more fitting price-point.

However, I'm also aware that it is a very different beast from a $60 game, so would be hesitant in labelling a rip-off.

As I said before there are distribution and retailer profit implications to consider which may well have had an impact. Also, from a business point of view, Nintendo may have internally projected that it wouldn't be a massive seller, so for it to be worth their while they'd need to set a certain price point for them to see a reasonable return.

It's easy for GOW / BOTW / GTA etc. to stick with a $60 price point & assign a large dev budget as they know they're going to sell 5 million + units. That's not the case for most games / products.