Nintendo announced today that Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, New Super Mario Bros. 2, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D will be available on the eShop and retail stores for $29.99 USD starting April 22.

According to sales numbers reported by Nintendo, these five games have sold more than 9 million units combined (physical and digital sales) in the US. Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, New Super Mario Bros. 2 also represent the three top-selling pieces of Nintendo 3DS software here with more than 2.15 million units sold.

Nintendo of 5 years ago would never have official, permanent, price cuts on their most successful games,

Nice try but your dead wrong. Why try to make this a negative thing, especially when most of all games drop in price in a matter of months by alot, when these are dropped to $29.99 from $34.99/$39.99?

Nintendo does a small price cut to have more sales and your thinking terribly of them?

Oh yeah lets prove a point, these were highly successful before these came out. So wats your point? They were dropped from $50 to $20 (or $30). I can show plenty more but i dont feel the need

whoo there buddy. I think what he is trying to say is they wouldnt have dropped the price so soon. It is soon relative to Nintendo. hell those Wii games you mentioned took years to drop pretty much got a price drop toward the end of the WIi's life and some of those games got released damn near in launch window.

OT im happy, games dont need to be at full price for years on end, thats a bit ridiculous, hopefully in the future Ninty will drop it even sooner. I might pick up NSMB2 myself.

Nintendo doing pricedrops? That's rare.

Those nintendo select games were issued late spring, summer of 2011, basically the Wii's last full functional year when sales were already down 50+% from their peak and like oniylde mentioned 4+ years from their original releases (for galaxy and twilight princess), also there were a total of 12 games selected and none with their alpha tier game s(new super mario bros Wii or Mario Kart), this is a seachange worth mentioning and in no way implied negativity.  That was all your doing.

Oh come on, why not Kid Icarus Uprising too!? D:

Yeah, I have to agree. Price drops like this within a year (DK3D came out last May) of some of these games in the middle of a system's lifecycle is new for Nintendo. The idea that Nintendo first-party games 'retain full retail price far longer than the competitors' has long been trumpeted by people praising the company as a sign of their development strength. I find it at least notable that they are, for the first time, abandoning the practice of maintaining full retail prices for top games on current systems in the middle (one supposes) of the system's life cycle.

Could this point to a new handheld soon? That wouldn't be my first guess, but it would be cool. I think this is just because of the fact that although 3DS is doing great, it's not on track with the original DS, and they are hoping to spur sales.

It makes one wonder: how many of those amazing original DS system sales were to people only getting it because of the abundance of Flash Cards for playing pirated games?

I think Ninty is slowly pulling their head out their butt as for flash cards i imagine ALOT. Besides my young cousins I dont know anyone besideds myself that actually bought any DS games. Hell i think i bought less than 10 the entire time i had it.

At Nintendo's last investor meeting they mentioned less expensive software as something they may try to implement in the future. This could be a test run since these games have already easily made there development money back and turned a hefty profit. Maybe we could see all 3DS retail games $29.99 and all Wii U retail games at $49.99