firebush03 said:
It's hard to say— pricing high and refusing to budge is a long-term strategy, not short-term. If sales dip only slightly, then it's a success as consumers will eventually come around (e.g. NS1 NA August 2025 price hike). If sales dip significantly, however, then that could be fatal for your brand (e.g. PS5 JP August 2024 price hike, PS3's infamous launch), at which point, the best call is to reverse the hike. That said: Seeing as MTFever still managed to outperform Mario Strikers (NS1), it is possible Nintendo is OK with this. Though I will add that I think the bigger issue here is less the price and more the fact that (i) Nintendo has heavily tarnished the Mario sports' brand power, having maintained a consistently underwhelming lineup of releases for nearly two decades, combined with (ii) very weak marketing for Fever. Had this game been hyped/marketed up like Aces was, then it could've at the very least outperformed Super Rush's (NS1) debut; but instead, they only chose to show off the fact that "You can play as 38 characters!!" without even as much as showing all 38 characters. Nintendo's marketing during 2017/2018 was crazy good! Heck, 1-2 Switch and ARMS both crossed 3 million within their first twelve months on market. Nintendo of today could never! |
Your Switch 1 example is confusing since its sales did take a significant hit there cause of that hike. Other than that that all seems right though. In general it'll be interesting to see how the sales of Nintendo games on the Switch 2 compare to the Switch 1 since after so many series broke or even outright shattered records avoiding a decline will be a very tall order in many cases. For example I dunno how they're gonna make the next Smash game have as much mass appeal as Ultimate.
