 Look, it's getting a little ridiculous in multiple facets of talking about video game pricing, especially for us here at Nintendo Prime, we're obviously focused on what's gonna happen with Nintendo Switch 2 and what's been happening with current Switch games. And while I could be on the side that Nintendo is this big, evil anti-consumer corporation, and certainly there are times with their pricing that I don't agree, I also think as consumers, we're not quite as understanding at times on why the price of video games are what they are and why, in many cases, they should be increased. Now, look, a lot of this drama begins when I was just sort of glancing around on YouTube and I saw videos such as by Zach and one of our friends from Switch Force over there where he was kind of inferring that another code recollection coming out January 19th being a $60 game when the original releases were never around that price and these are older games and they're not really things that people are going to, it's probably just not gonna be a mega selling game, right? This isn't a Mario Kart or even a Mario spin-off game such as Mario Party or something, right? So games are gonna probably sell a lot, so why is it at $60? And then, yeah, we have this rumor out there which is kind of weird because we've already seen $70 games from Nintendo. Tears of the Kingdom was one such case, over 20 million copies sold, $70 game. What's interesting there, of course, is that we already assumed when we saw that that we would probably see a lot more if not have the standard price of games already changed for Nintendo Switch 2 to around 70 bucks, but now we have a Zippo going out there throwing the crazy out there rumor that we're gonna have $70 games on Switch 2, which, I mean, look, logical deduction could have already told you that and I've seen a lot of interesting backlash both from consumers and also from content creators and I agree with some of this backlash in certain instances. I'll give you an example. I don't think under any circumstance should we be paying $70 for something like a Captain Toad style game. I don't think we should be paying $70 for an HD port of a Wii game or something like that, but on the other hand, I do think $70 is justified in some cases and obviously when we talk about the $60 price points we're seeing now for things like another code recollection, I can understand why people are upset with that, but also there are things that we're not considering in all of this. Now look, obviously there's the basics that everyone will bring up inflation, inflation, inflation, right? Your 60, your $70 today is not worth what it was 15 years ago, you know, 20 years ago when these prices started to become standard right around $60, so there is that and the whole rest of the world is already adjusted. Like this is very much a first world North America, well in particular United States problem because the rest of the world has been increasing prices on games this entire time over all of these years as the money becomes worth less the prices of the games increase. That didn't really happen in the United States with the US dollar, we just kind of kept prices the same but I am also going to offer an argument on why in many cases if Nintendo wants to charge me $70 like they did with Tears of the Kingdom I'm going to be willing to pay it and also cases where if Nintendo does go a little bit too greedy with it they might actually get me to buy less games. So first let's talk about the $70 thing and why I think there are justifications for Nintendo. You see the rest of the industry and again we can't blame every developer and every publisher for this but in many cases in the triple A industry games have found a way to subsidize their income so they might still charge you $60, $70 or more for collectors editions, deluxe editions, et cetera but then they'll have micro transactions they'll have loot boxes they'll have cosmetic items that you could buy on top season passes, all of this sort of stuff that you can buy in addition to and this isn't even including like day one DLC or multiple like little small DLC packs along the way we're not talking about things that feel like full-on expansions like the Blood & Wine DLC for the Witcher 3 we're talking about little tiny dinky ones that might just be a couple new maps in Call of Duty, right? We're talking about those smaller ones where they call it DLC because technically it is and they might charge you $20 for it but you're not really getting a lot of value for that $20 and I know value is in the eye of the beholder so maybe to you it is worth that monetary investment and for you out there you hardcore Call of Duty players might think it's worthwhile. Hey, I'm happy for you. Here's the thing. I do feel in the back of my mind that Nintendo can get away with a $70 price point that idea that Nintendo doesn't subsidize their income as much as people think while we do get major DLC packs like we have side order coming out for Splatoon 3 that is a massive expansion pack level DLC and we know this based on the prior couple of times they did DLC for the previous Splatoon game so we have an already natural assumption that this is going to be a fairly substantial DLC but what Nintendo didn't do with Splatoon 3 is micro-transaction the hell out of it. If you think about Splatoon 3, it is ripe to be set up for the current AAA model, right? You could have season passes. You could have, put it this way, the cosmetics in the game are unlockable but they're unlockable by playing the game and it could have made that a monetary thing as well and Nintendo chose not to do that and I mentioned Splatoon because it's one of those games that is perfectly set up for the current AAA model and yet Nintendo just doesn't do it. Smash Bros was sort of the same way. Yes, you could buy the characters individually and look Smash Bros is maybe one of the closest examples Nintendo has to a more traditional peace-mealing experience but they also offered you to buy everything at once for one price and that one price would give you a pretty substantial addition of content so you could argue almost expansion pack. Like even though you could still buy things on an individual level. I think having options like that are good for the consumer because maybe there's only one extra character you wanted out of the whole extra characters they've added and so then that's the character you're going to focus on and just buy that one. Maybe you just want a Banjo-Kazooie so you only bought Banjo-Kazooie, you didn't buy the rest of the DLC. That is your choice. I believe consumer choice is important but Nintendo doesn't really do this stuff. Think about Tears of the Kingdom and all the cosmetics in that game. Those could have been piecemeal to us. They could have been loot boxed to us and they didn't do it. Same with Mario. Same with the Mario Party games. Same with pretty much every game Nintendo makes. I'm not saying Nintendo never participates in this extra revenue stuff. We see this with their mobile games, right? The Fire Emblem game on phones and all the Jurgalia loss before they shut that down. Pikmin Bloom has some stuff going on with it. We see it with the Animal Crossing pocket camp. So yeah, Nintendo participates in some of this stuff but they're doing that in a marketplace where that's what that marketplace expects. The consumer on a phone expects micro transactions, expects having to spend money for in-game currency and stuff like that. That is an expectation that doesn't exist on Nintendo's consoles, despite the fact that many third party games do that stuff. Like we have NBA 2K on Switch and yeah, you have to spend a hell of a lot of money if you actually wanna make your guy good in the NBA 2K My Career mode. This is just permeating all throughout the industry. But Nintendo doesn't do it. And since Nintendo doesn't do it on at least a massive across the board scale with all of their games, to me, this means their games are worth the price increase to $70 because unlike all these other companies that found a way to subsidize their games on top of the initial sale, almost all of Nintendo's money outside of their new subscription service with Nintendo Switch Online or more recent subscription service comes from the sale of these games. When you buy Tears of the Kingdom, there's no DLC coming. This is the least according to the developers. There is no more content. There's nothing else you can buy to make the game better unless you wanna build a streaming PC and do all that modding stuff from fans. But the point is there's nothing you could buy from Nintendo. They just would give you complete experiences. Everything's within the game. And if we want that kind of stuff to continue, then we can't keep getting mad that Nintendo's not gonna charge $70. Even for games like a Mario Party that you might go, well, fine, $70 for the next 3D Mario, $70 for the next Zelda game, $70 for the next Animal Crossing or something Mario Kart, that makes sense. But they can't be charging $70 for Mario Sports games or $70 for Mario Party games or $70 for side-scrolling Kirby games. And again, the argument doesn't change for those games either. If you think about it, all of those games could find ways to subsidize their revenue by piece-mealing and nickel-endiming consumers, and yet Nintendo doesn't do it. So if Nintendo's not going to do that and yet money is worth less today than it's been worth 15, 20 years ago, then Nintendo has to make up some of the money lost in other ways, either by selling significantly more copies, which you can argue cutting prices on games could do that. And again, this is another thing Nintendo doesn't participate in is slashing prices on games. Then Nintendo can find other ways to make up that revenue and that's by increasing the overall purchase point of the games. I do think $70, again, doesn't make sense for every game Nintendo releases, but I think for them, they're more justified in it than most of these other companies. Now the scary thing for a lot of us is that Nintendo doesn't drop the prices of their games. When you see a game coming at 70, if it costs 70 right now at launch, it's probably still 70 bucks, five, six, seven years from now. And that part does suck. And while I understand Nintendo maintaining a certain price point for a select amount of years, say a three, four year period, there needs to be a point where maybe Nintendo starts to bring the pricing down, but unfortunately that's just not the way that company works. Helps maintain the value of their games and adds incredible resale value, but also, man, the idea of spending $60 today to play Breath of the Wild after tears of the kingdom is out, feels a little nuts. And to be fair, if you're buying online, it's pretty hard to spend MSRP on Breath of the Wild because almost every retailer sells it for less because they have too many copies of it. But if you're in store, welcome to your Walmart, enjoy paying your $59.99 for Breath of the Wild nearly seven years after release. It's a little crazy. That being said, there's also the price point that SwitchForce was talking about in terms of some of these smaller remastered remake games coming back that were never expensive in the first place and aren't very long and are very niche, charging $60, $70 a pop. I do think that that might be a little much. If you're trying to just, if you've accepted that another cold recollection is just going to be a flop, right? If you know, no matter what you do, this game is going to absolutely tank, then I can understand charging the $60 they're charging because you might as well get as much money as you can out of the few people that you know are buying the product. That I understand the market demand isn't super high and you don't think decreasing the price is going to increase market demand. So you might as well just get as much as you can while you can and just be happy that you were able to release the game at all. The other caveat is, well, maybe if you did reduce the price to something like $20, $30, maybe you increase the consumer base, which therefore can mean, hey, if this does well enough, we make more games like this moving forward. And that argument is always going to exist so long as you're charging a lot for a fairly niche product. So I am sort of on both sides of the fence and maybe that just makes me a fence sitter. I get what Nintendo's doing, but I also think there are times things are overpriced. I don't know, it's an interesting conversation point and this is why I wanted to have it and then kind of just toss it out to you guys because what I think is just my opinion. And I want to hear your guys' opinions on this as well, be it the overcharging necessarily for smaller, more niche games, this new $70 price point that forget Zippo, we pretty much already knew what was going to happen anyways, especially when tears of the kingdom still sold 20 million plus at 70 bucks clearly, not affecting or hurting sales at all. So you guys let me know if you think about this down in the comments below. And I'm very curious to hear from our international fans as well from other countries besides the US because you guys have seen the prices of games continue to rise in Nintendo games as well over the years. So you're kind of used to this. So to you, you might be laughing at the idea of us being like, oh, $10 increase, LOL. I wish my games only went up $10 in the last 10 years. But again, it's very much a first world problem and video games themselves are very much a mostly first world enjoyed thing because of just how expensive they are. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I am Nathan and Robert Jants from Nintendo Prime. We'll catch you in the next video.