 Hey everyone, before I talk about this very, I guess almost controversial topic, I'm gonna remind you guys that we are giving away three copies of Metroid Dread. Right now you want to subscribe to enter. Actually, I believe in this video, down in the description and the pinned comment, I'll also have the full way to enter, so yeah, being subscribed is part of it. There's additional entries you can gain beyond your subscription. So that's just to win two of the copies of the last copy. The third copy will actually be given away on the live stream and will literally just be based on whether or not you are subscribed to the channel and obviously at that live stream. Alright, so today Nintendo announced a lot of stuff. Animal Crossing was great. We'll maybe talk about that later, if not at least on tonight's live stream. I'll spend some time talking about how amazing the Animal Crossing content coming is. I'm very, very happy with both the paid DLC and the free content update, both coming on the same day. Only $25 for DLC that's essentially an entire game added to Animal Crossing New Horizons. It's a happy home designer, but happy home designer like on crack. It is literally like insane the amount of stuff they're adding and I'm thrilled about that. But snuck in there and now announced individually was the pricing for Nintendo Switch Online plus Expansion Pack. The pricing is only available in one year memberships and it's $50 a year or $80 a year, $50 for the individual membership. By the way this includes the original $20 subscription so it's $30 in addition and then the $80 is the family membership or $45 in addition. The thing is, we learned some things about this. For starters the Animal Crossing DLC is included in this Expansion Pack which might make it seem worthwhile. Outside of a small note on Nintendo's website that you only have access to this DLC while you are subscribed. So once you get past that one year membership and you're renewing for a second year, if you're thinking oh $25 of this individual one year membership goes towards that, guess what if you end your membership there you still don't have access to the DLC. It's official now Nintendo has confirmed that yes you only have access to Animal Crossing DLC if you are an online member as long as you are an online member or you can obviously just buy it separately individually. This just confirms I will be buying it separately even though I'll probably still get at least a year membership so I could test out some of the N64 and say basically if I didn't have a YouTube channel I wouldn't even get that year membership but here's where I am a little interested in furthering this conversation now that we know that. We have a couple people that we want to pay attention to here and I want to give a shoutout to TheRealDeFox, he's one of our longtime viewers out on Twitter who sent some of this stuff to me to give me to pay a little attention. This is going into some rumor territory so I don't want to presume that this is 1000% fact but this can explain why Nintendo Switch Online with the expansion pack portion in particular is so damn expensive. So this person named Sharon for starters, no one was really paying attention to her, let me actually open her Twitter profile, she loves games and geek stuff, nothing really else. There's nothing of note for this Sharon person on Twitter except that they said something back on October 11th that's quite interesting. Nintendo hasn't released the price of N64 games yet but I heard it's like a full price game nowadays, that means somewhere between $40 to $70 and she says I think that's with everything included, at least that's how I understand it. And again I didn't pay any attention to this because this is somebody with no track record, well it's $50 or $80, she was dead on. So then she said today that when Nintendo did the whole NES and SNES for online membership they thought it was way too cheap for their classic catalog, that's why the new membership cost that much. George told me that Gameboy games are supposed to come too, again we've had Gameboy game rumors for a while, but Gamecube slash Wii games will actually be separate releases so it won't ever be part of the service. My take, I feel this is the way NES and SNES updates are so bad etc, I don't really care about her opinions on stuff. Emily Rogers who we all know, one of the best Nintendo insiders out there but again still considered this rumor, she opened up today after the price point came out and she said licensing costs are likely the main culprit behind Nintendo Switch Online expansion's bold price. I heard Sega were paid very very well, remember a moment did my stream I said if this is because of Sega, you know, leave between the lines. This is notable because Sega weren't big fans of Wii's virtual console service due to low sales, revenue split and lack of marketing. Hence why Sega didn't support the Wii U virtual console. Third party titles from Konami and Capcom are also being licensed for the Genesis Nintendo Switch Online so the licensing costs begin to add up after a while and who knows what the licensing agreement plus arrangement was between Nintendo and Rare slash Microsoft. So they're essentially saying this. The price point was always going to be $30 or $50 or $80 it was always going to be this way because the licensing costs to have Sega come on let alone all those third party games is just insanely expensive that seems to be the justification here. Nintendo tacking on the Animal Crossing DLC isn't because they're actually making a lot of money off the Animal Crossing DLC on Nintendo Switch Online it's because Nintendo knew ahead of time there was going to be backlash over this price point so they threw in the Animal Crossing DLC to kind of lessen that blow. Of course you still don't own that DLC and you lose access to it if you unsubscribe so you might as well buy it individually. The thing is, or at least buy it individually once you cancel your subscription, I don't know, my my problem with this obviously is that Nintendo is a company worth north of $50 billion and I understand that Sega and third parties are going to have a certain valuation for their products they're going to value Banjo-Kazooie at a certain rate they're going to value Castlevania at a certain rate Sega is going to value their library of games at a certain rate which is interesting because we already have a collection of Sega Genesis games on Switch that's significantly cheaper than this and you can buy it and own it and don't have to subscribe. My thing is this, I understand that it is stupidly expensive for Nintendo to get some of this content on their online service. You know what the right move to do is for a company worth north of $50 billion if you truly want to get 50, 60, 70, 100 million people subscribing to your service, you eat the cost and I think this is where Nintendo is unwilling to budge. They're not willing to eat the cost of these licensing fees assuming that all of this is true and because of that us consumers have to pay significantly more than what the realistic value is for these games especially in a world where all of these games are so easily illegally available to emulate. Now there's legal ways to emulate as well but these ROMs are widely out there and pretty much everything from the phones in our pockets to computers and everything else hacked switches can play all of these games without people really having to spend any money. So the value whether they like it or not isn't super high per se. Now the value of playing the games online does add some additional value especially for the N64 but still I can't sit here and pretend that this is going to be okay. I obviously got very heated and very upset during my live reaction because this to me is not an okay price point and even knowing that it's licensing fees that are causing this price point to be so high is only making me feel even stronger that Nintendo has been making the wrong decisions. Nintendo is in the midst of some of their most profitable years of all time. Their games are selling better than they've ever sold in the history of the company besides something crazy like Wii Sports. They are in the midst of seeing record numbers even in the midst of a pandemic. Nintendo's seeing sales numbers for their systems that are just skyrocketing. They just launched a new platform that's sold out pretty much everywhere. Hello Switch OLED it's not even a significant upgrade and it's still selling out. The thing is Nintendo is more successful now than they possibly ever been in the history of the company besides like the literal peak year of Wii and DS that was maybe the one time they were better off than today. They have more than 50 billion dollars in company valuation let alone money sitting in a bank and I'm talking USD not yen. USD 50 billion dollars. Think about that for a moment. Nintendo could afford to eat the cost of the licensing fees and not pass that cost on to consumers. They could have if they wanted to make it just a year membership thing they didn't want to do the month or three month and they wanted a full year commitment they could have massively lower these prices by more than half to counterbalance the cost. See some people are going to defend Nintendo in wake of this that hey it's not their fault that Sega and these third parties want so much money for their games to be on them. It's boo on Microsoft. It's boo on Sega and Konami and Capcom. They're just greedy. And sure we can argue boo on them but I have a different argument to make. My argument is look at what Microsoft and PlayStation have done. OK. Those companies aren't nearly as successful in the gaming space as Nintendo. I mean when I talk success I mean overall profit margins. Sony is a market leader forever and they clearly make a lot of money. Nintendo's just always made more. Microsoft has never really been a big grosser a big I shouldn't say gross or big net game in the video game market in terms of profits. Microsoft as a company can afford to not necessarily make a bunch of money off gaming but still the point is that Nintendo makes a lot of money off gaming more than pretty much any other company that's not like EA or Ubisoft or something like that or Activision. Those companies actually do make significantly more money than Nintendo. The thing is Nintendo could just do what Microsoft and Sony have done. Eat the cost of these licensing fees. Look at Game Pass. Game Pass is still the greatest value in gaming but why is it? Because Microsoft eats the cost of all the licensing fees and all the money to get these games on their service. They eat that cost and do not pass that cost on to the consumer. They have a set price point that encourages people to get in on their service and their hope is to eventually hit a junction point of 50 60 100 million people subscribe to Game Pass that's going to lead to future profitability levels that are insanely high. Netflix did the same thing. Yes, it did take them a while to finally become profitable. But now they are and this is Microsoft's approach to things. Sony did the same thing when they started, you know, and Microsoft technically when they did the games of gold and the PlayStation Network stuff where they're giving you free triple A games. This wasn't initially a profitable venture but overtut it has become profitable for these companies. Nintendo could have ate the cost of all of these licensing fees. All this expensive money that these companies want to look will give you the money you want. We're just not going to pass that on to the consumer. We're going to let the consumers still have a cheap service because we know our consumers don't value the games at this level. And then worry about growing your subscriber base. So the one thing we could always say about Nintendo Switch Online as much as the $20 still felt like a ripoff. No one likes having online gameplay held behind a paywall, but you wouldn't have it free on PC. I know the other consoles have it behind a paywall as well. But still it always kind of felt off that any of these consoles did that. But you know, you did get NES and SNES and you got some free games once in a while, including a temporary free game in Super Mario 35. So at least there felt like, OK, it's cheap. It's only $20 a year for one person, not that big of a deal. Obviously a lot cheaper with the family membership. So it's kind of like, look, it's a cheap entry point. It's not as great as the other services. It shouldn't be expected to be as great for how cheap it is. You know, voice chat on phones is just bullshit. But hey, cool. This is no longer a cheap entry point. This is around the cost of everything else. And it doesn't offer nearly the value of everything else. You can get Xbox Live Gold. You can get PlayStation Network. You can get Game Pass for similar price points. You can get XCloud and Android for similar price points. And all of those have higher value added for those prices. Why? Because those companies eat the costs to create value for the consumer that ultimately is going to lead. They're not doing it out of the kindness of the heart, by the way. They're doing it to get more people subscribed because they realize subscription fees add up over time and eventually become a massively profitable venture. Nintendo could have did the same thing here. I can't imagine licensing fees are so expensive for Genesis games and third party games and rare games. In comparison to what Microsoft is paying to have back for blood day one on Game Pass, what they're paying for MLB, the show 21, day one on Game Pass. I can't imagine that the fees for this stuff is anywhere close to what other companies like Microsoft are paying. I know Microsoft has a bigger bank role in general. That's not my point. My point is Nintendo has enough of a bank role for these old classic games that they could easily eat the costs that these companies are asking for. Not pass it on to consumers but massively increase your subscriber base. Imagine that Nintendo didn't increase the price point. Still only charged $20 and gave us N64 and gave us Genesis. Didn't tack on the DLC for Animal Crossing. They just gave us those platforms as part of that $20 package. You know how many people would have subscribed for 20 bucks a year. You know that their current numbers of 25 to 30 million would easily jump potentially to 60 to 70 million people? That's not gonna happen with this. They're going for not that many people are gonna be interested, so we're gonna charge them more. I think that's wrong. I think there's a lot of value here. Not going the way, I'm not saying they couldn't have increased the $20, the $30 or something. There is a more reasonable, happy medium price point we could have hit. It didn't have to stay at $20. But the point is, it didn't have to jump to 50. It didn't have to jump to 80 for the family. And I know people are gonna say, well, even a family plan, yeah, it's only gonna be an extra 10 bucks. This presumes, by the way, that on a family plan that you maxed out the amount of members on that family plan. Some people have done that, not everybody has. And then there's additional coordination, because usually what happens is one person pays for it and everybody pays that person. What if people don't pay? What if someone doesn't send you the 10 bucks? It can become a bit more complicated. I get it, some people deal with that and don't care. But again, I would say the individual membership is probably more popular than the family one. Now, some of us don't even have eight people to share with. So I don't have eight people to share with. I mean, you already have this whole YouTube channel, but I'm not sharing payment details with strangers. That's just not okay. So I'm still just as frustrated as I was before. This additional information doesn't help. It does provide some context so I can have some understanding, but I'm not okay with this and Nintendo can absolutely and should absolutely do better. I am not a shill. Believe it or not, I cover a lot of Nintendo content and I try to be really positive. What Nintendo's doing is not okay. And even if it would have lost the money in the short term, Nintendo still should not be selling them at this price point. I don't want to hear anybody. I know people are gonna go down and defend it. If these rumors are true, they're gonna go defend it. What you can't defend is that if you take rid of the subscription, you lose access to Animal Crossing DLC, which means you should have just bought it for $25. $50 and $80 is too much. I'm sorry. And these other companies can overvalue all they want. We already know Nintendo overvalues their games. It's just too much, too much money. It's not worth it. It's literally not worth it. So I'm gonna, by the way, I'll say this. When you say not worth it, and I've talked about this in the past, value is in the eye of the beholder. So if you look at these $50 and $80 price points and you say, this is worth it to me, I actually want to hear your reasoning. I want you to go down in the comments and give me some logical sense-based reasons on your opinion that this is actually worth the money to you. And, hey, if it is, more power to you, and that's cool. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and that's fine. You know, I've been anti-piracy for some time, but stuff like this is what almost justifies piracy in the first place, in my opinion. So, anyways, folks, I'm Nathan Robojans from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next video.