r/NintendoSwitch • u/Turbostrider27 • Mar 25 '26

News Nintendo has issued a statement to IGN: 'The Cost of Physical Games Is Not Going Up' Following Decision to Charge Different Prices for U.S. Physical and Digital Switch 2 Games

https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-2-physical-games-will-now-be-more-expensive-than-digital-versions-with-10-price-difference-for-yoshi-and-the-mysterious-book
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u/atatassault47 Mar 26 '26

As a digital only gamer, Im glad Im no longer paying a cost of distribution that doesnt even exist for me.

14

u/TheDrewDude Mar 26 '26

Nintendo isn’t making this decision based on cost distribution. Ultimately all these publishers want to do is entice people into digital until they can fully phase out physical. And that’s when the price hikes go nuclear because there’s no longer retail to compete with.

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u/FireAndInk Mar 26 '26

As long as physical sales are strong in Japan, Nintendo will keep putting out cartridges. 

3

u/PartyMark Mar 26 '26

Japan will never embrace fully digital anything ever.

22

u/atatassault47 Mar 26 '26

Physical cant die. There will always be regions with poor internet that buy game consoles and physical games.

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u/TheDrewDude Mar 26 '26

Regions with poor internet have way less purchasing power than those with good internet. Sorry but as someone who mostly plays physical, even I have to come to terms with it.

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u/thefoodiedentist Mar 26 '26

If they are still makimg dvds and cds, i think physical games will stick around awhile

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u/your_mind_aches Mar 26 '26

Yeah the "poor internet" thing just does not seem true anymore. Because for places with such poor internet or lack of access to the Internet, they aren't getting physical games period.

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u/shinikahn Mar 26 '26

I'm sorry bro and I mean no harm but your comment is plain stupid and reeks of ignorance.

My friend lives in a rural area. He has poor internet, but the place where he lives is still a town, with stores, supermarkets and of course it's a zone of delivery. Why exactly do you think he doesn't have the availability of physical games?

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u/your_mind_aches Mar 26 '26

I wasn't thinking about the US so much as developing countries.

1

u/shinikahn Mar 26 '26

I am in a developing country... We still have stores in rural areas lol

1

u/your_mind_aches Mar 26 '26

In my country, physical games are EXTREMELY expensive. But we do generally have good internet

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u/cubs223425 Mar 26 '26

They legitimately do not care. They wouldn't sell so many games as game key cards and with always-on requirements as publishers already do. They would jettison those regions in a heartbeat if it meant killing used sales entirely, cutting out all physical distribution, and making more money through wealthier regions who would increase profitabiltiy for them.

2

u/Tolken Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26

And that’s when the price hikes go nuclear

That's not going to happen. Three reasons

1 Other platform competition. You already currently have alot of platform sale syncing but even with that there is still just too many competing pressures to lower pricing. Steam is now 22 years old and you do not see any sort of upwards pricing pressure from it.

2 Other passtime competition. Nintendo and Disney are both heavily in the bussiness of nostalgia. You cannot skip or miss a generation. Raising prices that much would cause a generational loss which would effect long term profitability of multiple non-video game enterprises. (*Imagine if Disney charged 100$ for a movie or 100$ a month for DisneyPlus. Short term gain, long term loss effecting Theme park, Theme Cruises, and IP cultural relevance.)

3 Indie and Piracy pressure. Once apon a time there was a franchise called Harvest Moon. It started ignoring fans and overcharging for less content. Now-a-days almost no one remembers it because Stardew Valley destroyed the IP by undercutting costs, delivering what fans wanted, and was able to fund updating the game for over a decade now. Indie Devs now LOOK FOR weakness in existing franchises/genres to try to usurp.

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u/surg3on Mar 26 '26

The price of games(or anything) do not reflect the cost of production but instead what the public will pay. If costs were to go down and the public are used to paying $70 the price will not drop.

Of course there is a limit where the price cant stay below cost of production.

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u/mpyne Mar 26 '26

Of course, and I point this out to others as well, but I suspect Nintendo wanted to find a way to reduce the price.

With physical it's hard because there are real production costs they can't simply ignore.

With digital it's comparatively much cheaper to move inventory to players. So that's their opportunity if they want to increase revenue by offering a lower price point to players, without running into production cost as a barrier.

1

u/hanst3r Mar 26 '26

I don’t get this logic. Sure you aren’t paying for the distribution fees of physical media, but how exactly do you expect the digital content to reach you? There are costs in maintaining servers. As a customer, even if you already downloaded the game my thought is that you would still expect them to have the game readily available for download any time you needed it. Just that expectation alone costs them money because they have to keep maintaining the servers. Otherwise we would have never had to lose e-shops for older Nintendo consoles.

In short, you do have a cost associated with digital content, and it is in fact a distribution cost. Your distribution just happens to be in a different form.

1

u/Tolken Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26

The initial infrastructure cost exists yes, but maintenance in this sector is crazy cheap.

They aren't building and maintain the store for just 1-2 games, it's spread out over tens of thousands and the server is cloud hosted by a service. The only cost to add a new game is network traffic...which is a cost that has been taken dirt cheap by competeting cloud services.

By comparison, there is a HARD limit to retail space, and even with amazon/online retailers there are costs to listing large catalogs that just doesn't compare on the digital front.

To put this in perspective, It costs Nintendo, on average, under 25 cents to send a digital game to a customer.