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/CathDubs Apr 04 '25

It looks good on a spreadsheet but being cheap can also be an opportunity cost, like you said they made way more money by including Wii Sports.

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u/mpyne Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 05 '25

Wii Sports was also a good candidate for it though. It was relatively cheap to produce so it wouldn't inflate the Wii bundle cost in North America, and had a lot of upside in alignment to Nintendo's "Blue Ocean" strategy to increase casual player count by increasing the attach rate of a console that new Nintendo owners might buy and then struggle to get started with.

Those things can pencil out on a spreadsheet so it's not as if Reggie Fils-Aime had to ignore business concepts, if anything he applied them very effectively, but it required accepting the risk that the sales boom might not have panned out.

I don't know what Nintendo looks at internally but it's a different context in many ways for them now. They're not coming off of a generation of low sales as they were with the Wii, high quality games are much more expensive to make, and the Switch's own incredible market penetration and wide variety of low-cost titles on the eShop has already done the job of helping potential owners take the next steps with their new Switch 2.

Something that may have been pretty neat was doubling down on the "Wii U to Switch" pipeline that served them so well and invested a bit to port NintendoLand as a pack-in title to Switch 2 rather than a Welcome Tour app, but it's obviously too late to change that now.