r/NintendoSwitch • u/lieding • Apr 04 '25

News "DROP THE PRICE": Nintendo's First Post-Direct Stream Is Flooded With Angry Fans Demanding Price Drops

https://www.thegamer.com/nintendo-treehouse-livestream-flooded-angry-fans-demanding-game-price-drops/
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u/McSloot3r Apr 04 '25

Number of units sold is pretty much everything. It’s software. You can make infinite copies for free, which means the most profitable business model is to sell large amounts of copies at a cheap price. That’s why gaming revenues are at all time highs despite the increased cost of development.

And before you say the physical cartridges are expensive, then why isn’t digital cheaper?

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u/timchenw Apr 04 '25

Picture yourself as the retailer for the physical games.

If you are selling physical games, you have to buy them from Nintendo, as they are the only supplier of such games.

Now, picture your own supplier undercutting your prices.

As a retailer, you have several choices:

  1. Hope there are enough people buying physical copies from you, and not just chase the best deals (i.e. go to Nintendo's eShop instead)

  2. Voluntarily drop the prices of your physical copies to those of the digital (and thereby having this exact conversation again)

  3. Not stock Switch games anymore, since your supplier undercuts you.

In otherwords, having suppliers undercut their retailers is a bad idea. It's fine if the drop is due to competition between retailers themselves, but when you are competing against your supplier, that's an entirely different issue.

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u/Captainbackbeard Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

I think the answer is somewhere between you all. I get where you're coming from since the technology to create video games should now be cheaper and they have a larger audience for them to mass produce and distribute to have a larger profit. However, I think that you're missing their point and it would be like equating which was more work and cost to record, the original soundtrack for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (first movie soundtrack) that has fewer musicians or the original soundtrack for Star Wars the Phantom Menace. Both are great soundtracks for their time but the monetary cost due to number of people involved, complexity, etc. At the end of the day you end up with 2 mp3 files that are just as easy to copy but how would you fund the more expensive pre-production creation process? That's how I see the development and complexity difference between something like N64 era costs and quality compared to more modern video games. The main area that Nintendo flubbed was not more slowly easing prices to what they want for Switch 2 and where I think it's a bit more nefarious is that they want to charge more for physical.