Physical can be traded in / sold

I still think Physical is a better deal personally.

I've received a PM from a moderator with the instruction to look over my thread and remove the heat due to a sizeable number of reports. Since I am not a moderator myself, my abilities are limited in accomplishing this task, but I'll do my best.

I reviewed the thread and so far only two moderator actions have been taken: firebush got banned for console warring and an account with a very low post account got his post edited to spare them a ban. There's no public response by a moderator to tell the community what exactly is the concern with this thread. Other posts that I consider problematic all have two things in common: One, they contain personal attacks against me and two, everyone, including myself, has refrained from responding to them in order to keep the thread on topic. So my verdict is that the thread is actually doing fine because people steered around the bumps in the road to have a discussion about Switch 2 prices.

I see no justification to lock this thread at this point where we have arrived at.

With the door already open, I'd expect the Next CoD, Fifa, Madden, etc to be 80 on PS/MS and 80 on Switch 2.

Mario Party and Kirby come with new expansions, maybe even Switch 2 exclusive ones. During the past eight years, Nintendo's expansions have come at prices between $20-30, so when the Switch 1 versions still cost $60, it's not hard to see in these two cases why the versions for the next gen console cost $80 and why it would justified.

TotK's Switch 2 Edition features are a lot less meaty, so at first glance it isn't clear why it costs $80. It was the outlier for Switch 1 games in the USA though, as the only costing $70. BotW's Switch 2 Edition also received a $10 bump in comparison to its Switch 1 counterpart, so from that perspective it makes sense why ToTK got the same bump despite coming without an expansion like Mario Party and Kirby. Based on this pattern, I don't expect other Switch 2 Editions without an expansion to cost as much as $80.

Even if this is true, consumers have a choice to not support. People gotta stop acting like this actually harms them. You aren't required to purchase the games and consumers don't get to decide what a publisher should charge. Consumers expect their salaries to rise but are surprised when inflation raises everything around them. Guess what, rising game prices is how salaries for developers and publishers rise. We have a choice to accept the price or not. Just because someone else does accept the price, doesn't make that individual a white knight or shill for Nintendo. 

Main problem with Rol's analysis is that inflation doesn't apply much to tech. Because tech advances at a rate that most sectors don't get close to. A lot of tech gadgets are actually CHEAPER than they were in the past, despite inflation and vast tech advances in those products. That's because tech progresses faster than inflation. So as time passes we get far more advanced tech that is often the same price or even cheaper than past products, despite the fact that those dollars are worth less now. Tech beats out inflation and then some.

ie. Last week I bought a 55inch 4k flat screen TV for less money than I bought a 32inch standard definition tube TV in 2003 - so the tech advanced to 4k and flat screen, plus the screen is significantly bigger, AND it was cheaper, despite the fact that inflation over that period of time has been 73%. If tech was blindly subject to inflation, and given it's a significantly larger TV, I'd have paid probably something like $800-$900 for the TV last week, instead it cost $260. Inflation in no way gets Nintendo off the hook for these crazy prices.


The simple reason that Nintendo is charging so much for literally everything next gen is because they think they can get away with it.

It's the same reason they never discounted the Switch nor Switch games. They could have easily dropped the Switch to probably $200 and still been making money, but they didn't need to because the demand didn't drop sufficiently for to force their hand on price cuts. And I guess by 2023 when Switch sales really started to drop they just figured well it's getting close to the end of it's life anyway so why bother.

The thing is, Switch was an affordable system. So even if it was annoying they never dropped prices, it did make business sense for most of Switch's lifetime due to the demand, and the system was affordable from launch so consumers accepted it.

With the Switch 2 Nintendo has firmly abandoned affordable territory. Games are suddnely $10-$20 more, the system is 50% more, joycons are $10 more, the dock (for those few people I guess who break their dock) I think costs like $20 or $30 more. Last gen games cost $10-$20 more basically just to get a framerate/resolution upgarde which probably costs Nintendo about nothing. Hell even the little info-minigame tutorial literally called "Welcome Tour" costs $10 instead of being packed-in as, ya know, a welcome tour.

Inflation does nothing to explain these price increases. The only explanation is that Nintendo thinks they can get away with it and Switch owners will buy the Switch 2 and loads of games no matter how much they jack up prices. I, for one, and clearly millions of other people judging from the nearly blanket outcry among Nintendo gamers, are not having it. In the few minutes it took to go from DK replacing Mario in the Direct and then seeing the HW and SW prices after the Direct, I went from being like "damn okay maybe I will get this soon after launch" to "I can wait a few years if need be and see if Nintendo is forced to drop the price".

Let's stop trying to excuse Nintendo, for the few who are doing it, from what is very clearly a greedy money grab due to them getting cocky after the Switch the exact same way Sony was after the PS2, and Nintendo was after the DS. This is Nintendo's PS3 moment, and another 3DS moment for them. Sadly they appear to not be learning from the past.

Even if tech costs remained the same, or were lower, doesn't mean everything else is.  Advertising, fuel, electrical, wages, medical, cost of development, shipping, fees, regulations, employee increases, security, ect, ect. 

what on earth did you just post, miedek?

Hardware MSRP sounds fine to me.
And I wasn't going to be an early adopter either way, despite not expecting price drops any more for consoles down the line.
But as with many things, we still make observations and have opinions on things we are not personally invested in. Whether due to how it may affect others, how it may affect us indirectly, or just because it's interesting.

One thing I do find strange about the Switch 2 price in Sweden though is how it's priced about the same PS5.

And the MSRP for PS5 in Europe was raised in 2022 by about 20%. So it surprised me seeing Switch 2 sitting around the same price.

As for software, that's where I'm not sure how I feel about this.
You can base the value of a game on the enjoyment you get out of it, or on how much it cost developers to develop, vs how many units they expect to sell. I don't think either way is wrong.

But the former is personal preference. While the decision will be with the publisher.
If Nintendo, who generally have shorter and cheaper development cycles compared to other "AAA" games say their games are worth $10 more (which they already did in 2022 btw, following PS5/SX), I'm sure a lot of other publishers are thinking the same.
Should games that offer both a lot of gameplay value and cost a ton to develop be $90 or $100?

Pretty much every publisher except Nintendo commonly have deep discounts over time.
Even if you bought a Switch several years later, you'd still likely be paying full price for Nintendo's games.
Which further puts into question why Nintendo out of everyone felt the need to be the first to do this.

I know a lot of people are apprehensive about DLC. But those can be good ways (if done right) for publishers to charge more for the game to people that are already priced in and know they enjoy it. Especially considering rising development costs and inflation.

You missed an obvious fact: All those things you mention are rolled up into the price.

Obviously the price of any tech product already accounts for all the things you listed. You're just reinforcing what I'm saying, that tech advances so much faster than inflation does that the cost of tech drops far faster than all those other things which go up in price over time, to keep tech products mostly immune to inflation, sometimes so much that they actually get cheaper over time in the currency even as the currency loses value, as in my TV example that shows TVs cost a small fraction in real value of what they did a couple decades ago.