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. 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.

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.

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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.

Point 2 in my original post addresses technology, so that has been taken care of.

The rest of your argument boils down to selective memory, because the initial outcry against Switch 1 prices for the console and its accessories was worse than what we've seen for Switch 2.

I am not worried about "millions" of Nintendo gamers being reactionary, because most of these same people are prone to change their minds again in just five days when Mario Kart World gets its Direct.

By the way, upgrade packs for Switch 1 games that only improve framerate/resolution are free to download.

By the way, upgrade packs for Switch 1 games that only improve framerate/resolution are free to download.

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.

I saw your point 2, and no that doesn't address a 50% increase in price, so nope, sorry, you have not "take care of" it.

You can't just write off what I said by claiming you already addressed it when you in fact didn't. Next gen systems are always more powerful, and yet they don't lead to such huge price increases. If your point 2 covered this then we'd all be paying like $2000 for every system these days.

Like I said, for the few (like you) who are doing it, let's not just excuse Nintendo of what they are clearly doing - getting greedy and money grabbing instead of trying to gain customers. If you were right, there would have been no internet-wide outcry over the prices. If you were right, Nintendo wouldn't have been too afraid to even include the price in the Direct.

I'm not using any selective memory, if there was an outcry over the price of the Switch I heard nothing about it. And even if there was, that is very different than the outcry over Switch 2 prices. The Switch was actually cheaper than the previous system (the WiiU being $300/$350, with Switch only at $300), so if there were people mad about the price I can't imagine why. I could see people being mad about the $80 joycons, but the system itself was well priced and affordable, and games were the normal price. Obviously none of that is true with the Switch 2.

I'm not saying you personally should be worried about huge outcry from millions of people over Nintendo's next gen pricing strategy. I am saying Nintendo should be worried. They are guaranteeing significantly lower sales simply out of greed to try to get every last dollar from each individual consumer on every single purchase, rather than focusing on getting as many people to buy the Switch 2 as possible. Generally that is a bad business practice, especially for gaming where the companies make most of their money from selling games, not the systems. In fact it is the opposite strategy they went with for the Switch. And the immediate, lasting, and blanket outcry over the prices shows that Nintendo has really screwed up and are out of step with their consumers.

If you're fine with these prices, hey that's great for you. But there are many millions of people who aren't and that is gonna show up in far fewer sales, all because Nintendo decided to get greedy on prices after the Switch's success. Put simply, it's just basic greed.

The only times a company has increased the price of it's systems by 50% or more from one gen to the next are:

Genesis to Saturn (yeah that didn't work out well as this led to the death of Sega as a hardware maker)

GBA to DS (granted that worked out well, but the Game Boy line was so extremely inexpensive that the DS was still a cheap system at $150)

DS to 3DS (a huge blunder that caused Nintendo to pretty quickly significantly drop the price due to lack of demand)

PS2 to PS3 (a huge blunder that led to perhaps the most cringeworthy statement in gaming history of Sony telling people to get a second job to buy their system)

And now Switch to Switch 2 (which we're already seeing how this is gonna go based on the universal outcry to Nintendo's new pricing strategy, breaking with decades of selling affordable systems)

I'm stating one simple fact:

Nintendo is being greedy and charging extra for everything simply because they think they can and people will still buy it due to how popular the Switch has been. This is a fact, and you are apparently arguing against this fact, using stuff like "inflation" and "power" which doesn't at all explain their prices because then you'd have to apply that to every system over the decades and that would lead to systems costing several times what they actually cost today. Hence, you're making excuses for Nintendo, which don't "take care of" the facts I'm pointing out.

And I'm making one simple prediction:

Based on the huge outcry, and how obviously anti-consumer and greedy Nintendo's Switch 2 pricing strategy is, the Switch 2, despite looking like an awesome system, is gonna be selling well below what it would have if Nintendo hadn't gone all greedy and overpriced on everything. We saw exactly this strategy and the results it had with the PS3 and the 3DS. This history tells us to expect Switch 2 to sell not much more than half of what the Switch sold. Nintendo I think is looking at a few tens of millions fewer sales than it would have had if they priced things reasonably, maybe a 30m drop, which means hundreds of millions of fewer games sold.

And my main point:

Reasonable prices would lead to more money being made for Nintendo. So they are creating a lot of ill-will towards themselves in a greedy money-grab attempt to grow the business, but the obvious effect I think will be that they will shrink their business. And in addition of course it just means fewer people will get to play Nintendo's great games. So it's a lose-lose-lose, they hurt their reputation, they hurt their business, and they hurt their fans.

I saw your point 2, and no that doesn't address a 50% increase in price, so nope, sorry, you have not "take care of" it.

You can't just write off what I said by claiming you already addressed it when you in fact didn't. Next gen systems are always more powerful, and yet they don't lead to such huge price increases. If your point 2 covered this then we'd all be paying like $2000 for every system these days.

Like I said, for the few (like you) who are doing it, let's not just excuse Nintendo of what they are clearly doing - getting greedy and money grabbing instead of trying to gain customers. If you were right, there would have been no internet-wide outcry over the prices. If you were right, Nintendo wouldn't have been too afraid to even include the price in the Direct.

I'm not using any selective memory, if there was an outcry over the price of the Switch I heard nothing about it. And even if there was, that is very different than the outcry over Switch 2 prices. The Switch was actually cheaper than the previous system (the WiiU being $300/$350, with Switch only at $300), so if there were people mad about the price I can't imagine why. I could see people being mad about the $80 joycons, but the system itself was well priced and affordable, and games were the normal price. Obviously none of that is true with the Switch 2.

I'm not saying you personally should be worried about huge outcry from millions of people over Nintendo's next gen pricing strategy. I am saying Nintendo should be worried. They are guaranteeing significantly lower sales simply out of greed to try to get every last dollar from each individual consumer on every single purchase, rather than focusing on getting as many people to buy the Switch 2 as possible. Generally that is a bad business practice, especially for gaming where the companies make most of their money from selling games, not the systems. In fact it is the opposite strategy they went with for the Switch. And the immediate, lasting, and blanket outcry over the prices shows that Nintendo has really screwed up and are out of step with their consumers.

If you're fine with these prices, hey that's great for you. But there are many millions of people who aren't and that is gonna show up in far fewer sales, all because Nintendo decided to get greedy on prices after the Switch's success. Put simply, it's just basic greed.

The only times a company has increased the price of it's systems by 50% or more from one gen to the next are:

Genesis to Saturn (yeah that didn't work out well as this led to the death of Sega as a hardware maker)

GBA to DS (granted that worked out well, but the Game Boy line was so extremely inexpensive that the DS was still a cheap system at $150)

DS to 3DS (a huge blunder that caused Nintendo to pretty quickly significantly drop the price due to lack of demand)

PS2 to PS3 (a huge blunder that led to perhaps the most cringeworthy statement in gaming history of Sony telling people to get a second job to buy their system)

And now Switch to Switch 2 (which we're already seeing how this is gonna go based on the universal outcry to Nintendo's new pricing strategy, breaking with decades of selling affordable systems)

I'm stating one simple fact:

Nintendo is being greedy and charging extra for everything simply because they think they can and people will still buy it due to how popular the Switch has been. This is a fact, and you are apparently arguing against this fact, using stuff like "inflation" and "power" which doesn't at all explain their prices because then you'd have to apply that to every system over the decades and that would lead to systems costing several times what they actually cost today. Hence, you're making excuses for Nintendo, which don't "take care of" the facts I'm pointing out.

And I'm making one simple prediction:

Based on the huge outcry, and how obviously anti-consumer and greedy Nintendo's Switch 2 pricing strategy is, the Switch 2, despite looking like an awesome system, is gonna be selling well below what it would have if Nintendo hadn't gone all greedy and overpriced on everything. We saw exactly this strategy and the results it had with the PS3 and the 3DS. This history tells us to expect Switch 2 to sell not much more than half of what the Switch sold. Nintendo I think is looking at a few tens of millions fewer sales than it would have had if they priced things reasonably, maybe a 30m drop, which means hundreds of millions of fewer games sold.

And my main point:

Reasonable prices would lead to more money being made for Nintendo. So they are creating a lot of ill-will towards themselves in a greedy money-grab attempt to grow the business, but the obvious effect I think will be that they will shrink their business. And in addition of course it just means fewer people will get to play Nintendo's great games. So it's a lose-lose-lose, they hurt their reputation, they hurt their business, and they hurt their fans.

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.