Except, likely, this isn't a thing Nintendo has been doing recently. They've probably done since the NES and SNES days, and they had great third party support for those consoles.

Hell, the 3DS and DS had pretty good third party support and even then the games Nintendo made were maintaining their pricing. In fact, the Pokemon mainline games that released on DS have gone up in price at times after the DS had ceased production.

So from that standpoint, the "lack of competition" belief is kinda mute.

its just how video game sales ten to operate. a game can only sell for full price for so long, before the game goes from selling thousands of copies a day to mere hundreds. thats when the price drops so that people will want to buy it. overall, a game can and will only make a certain pre-determined amount of money based on day-one sales, and price drops are then strategically placed to hit that number as soon as possible.

as for Nintendo, i have no idea what kind of sorcery they use to have their games maintain their price for over 20 years and still remain evergreen titles, but it works.

They dont really have competition in their own system to be fair.

Most third party games, especially the ones on PS4 and XB1 seem to drop in price really fast nowadays.  This is not good for their business.  I think they are doing it because of Steam though.  Lots of these same third party games are on Steam, and Steam is infamous for dropping prices and offering bundles and such.  The same games have to drop in price on the consoles to compete with Steam, and eventually it just becomes a culture where all of the games' prices drop fast.  This is great for customers in the short term, but this just doesn't seem like it is a sustainable business strategy in the long term.

Nintendo actually does things so that it can keep its business going for years to come.  They don't drop prices, because they don't need to.  If someone buys a Switch 3 years from now, they will still be willing to pay full price for Mario Kart, for example.  And there isn't really a compelling alternative to a lot of these Nintendo games (like Mario Kart).  Whenever a company makes a game that resembles Mario Kart or Smash Bros or whatever, it's just not as good as the Nintendo version.

So, it seems like whenever Nintendo makes a game it's often the best of that style of game around.  Therefore they can always charge full price.  But all those third parties, they actually hurt themselves by selling on Steam.  If their games are really good, then they would be better off staying on consoles and charging full price for years like Nintendo does.

I am curious, how much of a price cut would help boost software sales for Nintendo games? Would a price cut help increase LT sales of ARMS from 2 million to 2.5 million in a quarter? How about Xenoblade Chronicles 2?

I mean, it's not like Nintendo games have NOT gone down in price before. Star Fox Zero + Guard went down to $15-20, for example. Mario Tennis Aces was down to $45 a couple months ago in a fire sale in Amazon along with Odyssey and Zelda. Did you expect a $30 price drop for Tennis Aces at this point?

Sorry to bump this... but here's a video from Polygon on Sept. 1, 2018 that talks about Nintendo games maintaining their price.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emi74MDRMV8

Some have mentioned about the Disney comparisons, but this kinda goes a little deeper than what we've discussed in the comparisons. Just food for thought.

Nintendo first party title sales rarely drop down below the 'its not selling' line...

The price of the package doesn't really matter to most companies, they make dirt from physical sales, and they make up for it with DLC. Nintendo doesn't do much DLC, and they do value individual sale of their product more. Although I do disagree with it. Why spend $80 on Super Mario Odyssey in 2018-19 when you can get Red Dead 2 for $80, and cheaper during major seasons like Christmas. Their games don't hold their value like they believe they do.

That's not true entirely. But the difference is, Nintendo doesn't drop the price then, they stop producing the game. Which in turn leads to exorbitant prices for used games.

In fact, they do. That is the principal reason about strong Nintendo´s retro consoles success.