The worldwide distribution is more difficult for Nintendo as a smaller company. Soby does not only sell games, they sell electronics of all sorts. So if they enter a new market, they can profit faster than Nintendo. That's why Nintendo is slower to reach the world and relies often on partners. It has nothing to do with the prices.

Indie teams are mostly made up of considerably less than 100 persons. Shovel Knight got made by 5 persons, The return of Obra Dinn by a single developer! Nintendo games have hundreds on people working on a game. Sure, RDR 2 had an incredible big budget, But it is an exception in the industry. Horizon had 250 people working on it at max. On God of War worked 270 people. That is similar to Nintendo productions. Breath of the Wild had 300 workers on it. So you're wrong. Nintendo lies safely in the middle of the industry. That Rockstar has ridiculous budgets is the actual outlier.

Some people just love to make up alternative facts to bolster their worldview. I mean, this competition argument, or also here in the thread that Nintendo has indie levels of production. Just ridiculous.

Originally, the pricedrops were initiated by either the publisher or a retailer to empty storage and make space for newer titles. But even back then, Nintendos own IP had a tendency to just keep selling, thus Nintendo always ran out of games even without discounting them.

Then during the mid 2000s, Steam started taking over digital distribution on PC, and with it their steam sales. Digital goods in theory don't need to be dropped in price to sell the games out because they are not taking storage space and can't run out of stock either, so these sales were more of an artifact from physical distribution and as a marketing ploy to attract more customers to their platform.

Games these days wouldn't need the tricks of the 80's and 90's to sell their stock, but it had been ingrained into so many gamers mind that this artifact prevailed and is now an industrial standard even though we don't need them anymore. But Nintendo never needed these sales to sell, and thus are not dropping their prices. And they really don't need to, either; even if first week sales are not impressive, you can be damn sure that one year later, the accumulated sales will sound alot better by then. Some Prime examples this gen would be HZD vs BotW, where the Sony title was initially better selling, butover the course of the weeks got overtaken by Zelda, and even pricecuts and CE Rereleases weren't enough to catch that train again. A arguably even better example could be Dragon Quest XI vs Splatoon 2 in Japan, with Dragon Quest selling massively more early on, but Splatoon 2 instead kept on selling and is now threatening to overtake the combined sales of PS4 and 3DS DQ XI.

I understand that from a consumer standpoint, it sucks, I'd be the first to admit that. But with that kind of data and from an economic standpoint, can you really fault Nintendo for not discounting their games?

This has also a funny side effect for me. Generally, I wait a couple years before I buy a game until they are dirt cheap. But knowing this doesn't happen with Nintendo on the other hand, I buy them close to release. So in short, their high prices ensure that they are the most modern games I own (outside of Kickstarter). Funny how things work out sometimes.

People also like to take statistics that mean pretty much nothing relative to a particular argument and then pretend it's some kind of trump card because they can mold it to their preconception.  

Yeah that happens, but I don't see the point regarding what we discuss about. The stupid argument about competition was countered on many levels. It is the same kind of wrong, as people pointing out attach rate of a game. That is not comparable. If competition was the main thing here, than the same games should sell more on WiiU than Switch. But they don't. As it does not work that way with competition. Having more to choose from does not make top AAA games suffer for instance on PS4. That is because people have different tastes and usually choose the games in the genres they like and ignore the rest. If console X (like a Nintendo console) doesn't have these games, then the console isn't bought in the first place. Anyways, thread contains much more plausible arguments than that competition crap anyways, like to sell DLC and microtransactions you need to sell the game first,

you may not, but 99 others will. Great to be a Nintendo investor lol.

All that tells me is that people working at Nintendo need to get fired. If God of War and Mario Tennis/Labo has similar production values then  Nintendo devs are frankly incompetent. 

The same devs that had not one, but two games at 97 with one of them winning GotY 2017?  The same devs that delivered more quality 1st party content in less that two years than the PS4 or X1 did in two full years?  Oh or the same devs that can make enough quality games to support their own console, even with less 3rd party support than their competitors?

By that logic, all devs should just quit because not even God of War managed to score as high as Zelda or Odyssey.  OR..and hear me out on this...we can just accept the fact that good games come in all styles budget sizes, and team sizes.

Hell lets get real crazy and even accept that fact that just because you might like one game over another, that does not mean that the other game is any less of a game.

I wasn’t talking about Nintendo EPD, they obviously get big budgets and time to make their Mario and Zelda. Although that team is also just a bunch of hacks living off the work of their precedessors at this point, when was the last time they managed to make a new IP that was a critically acclaimed blockbuster? 

I was talking mostly about all the other games Nintendo puts out, your Yoshis and Captain Toads.