Honesty that's news to me because Sony certainly pushed Ratchet like a marquee title. If not then don't charge a premium AAA price of $70. That should be reserved for the biggest, highest selling IPs. Ratchet won't reach 3 million at its current price, let alone 5. We've already seen evidence it has short legs at $70. I'm convinced the $70 price is hurting these types of games bad.

Meanwhile on the Switch, BOTW sold at the same pace as the Switch itself, crushing the franchise record, and even niche titles like Xenoblade 2 sold in the millions.

I think Returnal was hurt by that price more than Ratchet, considering it's a new IP and a niche genre.

The best selling PS5 game currently is Miles Morales, which does not cost $70/80€. I think that might be an indicator for the higher pricing potetially hurting these games to a degree.

Why shouldn't Sony push Ratchet as a marquee title? Its one of their bigger releases of the PS5's launch year, one of the first titles that leverages the new hardware & most importantly its their most accessible $70 game so far. 

Unless you think Ratchet is done selling after its first sales update, I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion its showing bad legs, it should be close to 2 Million by the end of this month. The latest Sony financial report confirmed a 70% digital software split for the quarter. Rift Apart charted in the top 5 PSN charts for NA/EU while consistently charting in the UK/PAL charts. I'd also like to know the timeframe of how long it took Xenoblade 2 to sell in the millions. Returnal could very easily hit a 1+ million sold by the end of the year. 

Spiderman is also a massive IP in its own right. 

It depends. I pay premium prices for RPGs I know are going to be rare down the road, and also because I like to support such games in hopes that we'll get more of them. Falcom games are easily worth full price in my book. It also helps if they have tangible goodies.

I'm content to leave AAA titles in the bargain bin until they're $20-30.

I read on Louis Vuitton's website that they never discount their products. If they don't sell them, they simply destroy them. They do everything they can to curate their brand so they can maintain value. And it works. Bernard Arnault is the wealthiest man in Europe and in the same league as Bezos and Musk. 

Nintendo seems to be of the same mind. It's a lot different from the pump-and-dump strategy employed by EA, for sure.

I worked 5 years for a direct selling company in Brazil (Avon) and one thing we discussed is that we had lost the appeal of doing promotions. Promotions were necessary to keep the sales level stable, not to increase sales on a specific period or line of product. Nobody bought products at full price because everybody knew you could wait a few weeks and it would be discounted.

I think the same is happenning in the gaming market. Promotions are everywhere.

On top of that this generation improves a lot the performance of past generation games so even playing a past generation game is still amazing, and even more cheap. 

The argument about the 'keep percieved value high' that Nintendo uses versus what AAA developers do with prices.....its never ending. I think it is actually a rather understated form of the modern console/PC wars. One side pays more, and one side never has to worry about buying a game and then seeing it cost 30 bucks less a month later.

I believe it is one of the big sources of the arguments about pricing for games like Skyward Sword HD and Metroid Dread. Not the only one, but I think a price based culture war exists.

That also factors into things like sale frequency and intensity, but game prices are a rabbit hole.

Consumers dictate price of goods. As long as people keep price of nintendo software high, there is no reason for Nintendo to drop pricing.

Simple economics.

See quite a people defaulted to "The Waiting Game", no wonder you'd do that if the rewards are only a few days away. To tell you the truth, I also do the same, to me a game is worth half it's release price, although this generation purchases have been less than one third off.
Thankfully digital titles have been there to help around with a breath of fresh air and gameplay ideas at affordable bite-sized prices.

We did go over this already when the next-gen prices were announced last year, for which I am still surprised they are asking 80€ here in Europe. That is more than double the price I am sorta willing to pay right now.

Still, saw the video from Dunkey, and wanted to post this matter at VGC again,
and might as well post Jim's old video from the old thread. It was pretty good as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7kaK2-725w