Nintendo has no direct competitors. They will pricedrop if most fans don't buy their stuff, and everyone will forget about it.

GT7 costs almost 3 times more than GT Sport on average (and 12 times more than Assetto Corsa lol) and yet it's comfortably outpacing it. Nintendo's best software going 20%~ up shouldn't cause much trouble. Hate digital all you want, it's just the smart thing to incentivize people to go digital coz the profit margins on digital are much higher (and it also hurts the used game market). Bad for the consumers, excellent for platform holders so long as they can get away with it.

In light of recent news about Nintendo Switch 2 pricing, I'd like to remind everybody about the prices for the original Nintendo Switch that everybody complained about when it was revealed.

$299.99 for a console, no pack-in game
$59.99 for games, with the designated tech-demo game costing $49.99
$79.99 for pair of Joy-Con, $49.99 ala-carte
$69.99 for a Pro Controller

I distinctly remember everybody b****ing about these prices when they were first announced, before everybody got over it once we saw the system and games more. I'm not defending some of the Switch 2 price decisions (Mario Kart and the Welcome Tour specifically) but people should remember this next time they complain about console prices.

450 USD isn't comparable to the PS3's price. The PS3's price would be 950 USD today while the Switch would be 285 USD in 2006 - just 35 USD more than the Wii's 250 USD price point, and less than half the price of the PS3. It's also fair to note that Switch 2 can be played out of the box, while PS3 required the purchase of an HDMI cable, and those were much more expensive in 2006 than today.

I'm pretty sure the Switch 2 will sell more in its first 6 months than the Wii U did in its first 50 months.

I disagree with it being an underwhelming showcase, but completely agree with the game prices being crippling. It’s one thing to ask Nintendo’s target casual gamer audience to spend $450 on a console, which is already a very big ask. But I agree they could’ve overcome that with their momentum and the software if the games were comparably priced to Switch. But a whopping $20 increase per first party game? No way their pivotal casual audience is going to swallow that. It’s just not going to happen. So then what are you left with? The core gamers, the exact audience that caused N64 and GCN to be disappointments and Wii U to outright fail. It’s not a good sign at all honestly.

Fortunately, I feel like this is going to be a repeat of the 3DS era, where after a lackluster launch period of sales, Nintendo will quickly realize the problem and drop the prices and everything will probably work out fine after that. Though it may be unlikely to ever be a true phenomenon like Switch after that, like 3DS never was compared to DS.

Considering how wrong the internet usually is, I 100% expect it to be the first console to sell 200 million units.

Yep, I remember this as well, I bet if someone were to bump the reaction threads from the Jan 2017 presentation, you will see a lot of the same people making the same arguments.

Haven't checked his blog in a while because he turned very bipolar. He's been negative about the Switch successor since a few years, talking about how there will be no physical games anymore and other erratic claims. He also constantly claimed that he is done buying Switch games and now several years later he posts that he owns 500+ physical games. The point is that he has been swinging from one extreme to the other on a regular basis, so a lot of his blog posts are more about ranting than an actual analysis.

About Switch 2 he says it's going to be a dark age for Nintendo, the prices are way too high, but at the same time the big Nintendo games are going to be fine. And of course he picks to respond e-mails that reinforce the negativity.

But let's step back for a moment to look at the big picture. Virtually all the current outrage concerns prices. People don't criticize the concept of the console, nor its games, nor its specs, nor its foreseeable release schedule, there's hardly anything about the battery life which falls always in the same range as the original Switch's (2 to 6.5 hours now vs. 2.5 to 6 hours back then). Prices are getting hit hard, but at the same time they are the easiest thing to fix. We don't have an ideal situation that will make Switch 2 an unquestionable immediate and lasting success, but we aren't far off.

As far as a dark age is concerned, it implies that Nintendo's business will operate at around the break-even point or even at a loss. Yeah... no. This is so much hyperbole that I can't even be bothered to take this serious.

It's true that Malstrom's track record for predicting success or failure for Nintendo hardware has been clean ever since he has shown up. But at the same time his track record for competent analyses of smaller things has become very erratic, often devolving to the level of "old man yells at cloud." He hasn't had to predict success or failure for Nintendo hardware since eight years ago. Does he still have it? Maybe, but one thing is for sure: His overall body of work has regressed a lot over the course of the Switch generation. He used to be able to provide perspectives on a myriad of game-related topics that hardly anyone else could offer, but over time his blog devolved more and more into frustrated rants and plain trolling, like his recurring claim that Switch is a handheld and all of Nintendo's games are handheld games that they are charging home console prices for. Which raises the question: If Nintendo has pulled it off to make people pay $60 for games that were previously $40, then why should it now be a problem for Nintendo to make people pay $70-80 for games that were previously $60? That's the bipolarity of today's Malstrom.

The game prices are a big problem, but I do not think they will affect console sales that much. I think they will cause a significant drop in software sales. A lot of people who buy Mario Kart will then buy fewer additional games, and the attach ratio will be worse than the Switch's is. Whether the game sales will decline enough that it would be more profitable to have kept the price at $60 or even $70 remains to be seen. I'd actually like to see those game sales decline enough to do that to give Nintendo a little kick in the teeth to stop acting so greedy, but we'll see.

Not trying to defend the price increase, obviously I would prefer games to be cheaper, but I honestly don’t see it affecting them to any noticeable degree.

The people who bought Mario Kart (67 million), Animal Crossing (47 million), Smash Bros (35 million), Zelda (33 million), 3D Mario (29 million), Pokemon (26 million), etc. aren’t going to skip the next entries because of an extra $10-20.