Look up some scalper listings. No one’s making money scalping the Switch 2. Nintendo has met the demand with supply. It’s not like the XSX and PS5 where people were buying them up and selling them for twice as much. Scalpers now are just trying to break even. You might almost feel sorry for them.
This is the future of game development. Games cost more to make, so they’re going to pass the costs on to the consumer.
Right now games basically go for $70. There is a push for $80 and some developers are getting it (e.g. Nintendo with Mario Kart World). However, DLC will invariably push the game’s cost closer to $100. To stick with MKW, it’s not hard to see that not all the racers are in the game, who were in the last one. So the thinking there is they will probably be sold down the road for around $20 to get that game up to $100 total.
For a lot of gamers, the extra cost isn’t that big of a deal. Gaming is still a cheap hobby, and all three console makers are seeing good numbers with their more expensive consoles. The PS5 and Xbox Series X weren’t even improved, they just had their prices jacked up 10-20%. The Switch 2 is arguably just a minor uptick from the first model (and partially a downgrade from the OLED model) but it’s something like 30-50% more? And it’s selling like hotcakes, proving that gamers can afford to pay more, and will pay more. Not enough people are willing to put their foot down and declare that enough is enough when it comes to corporate greed. And with the costs of everything going up, it’s not 100% greed driving the price increases. Developers gotta eat too.
I liked the Rockband model. You bought the base game for like $60 (or more like $200-250, whatever it was with the drums, guitar, and mic, but those were reasonable hardware costs) and then you bought the songs you wanted for $2 apiece. With the first two, the on-disc songs were mostly great. With the third one, it was more questionable, but since you could export the previous games’ songs, it wasn’t as bad. The fourth one’s soundtrack mostly stunk, but then they gave us the ability to hide songs from certain sources, and by then we had over 150 songs from the previous 3 games (plus whatever DLC). Fun fact: Rockband is partially why console mods exist. Rockband 3 was the pilot program on Xbox 360, and to this day, you can load custom songs in it. It was never the intention to be able to do it for free, but the developers never cared that people were doing it. You could get uncensored songs, and you could get songs from other countries — there’s a whole “J-Rockband” scene of people playing Japanese music on it — that the developers were never going to chart/sell. Not only were the developers all musicians, many of whom made customs for the paid market, but they have been “caught” playing the free customs as well. (The developer, Harmonix, is now part of Epic Games and is responsible for Fortnite Festival, which is free to play, but you can’t use instrument controllers, and it’s a revolving selection of songs.)
The Sims business model.
Except it was “we know you wouldn’t spend $400 on a game so here’s a $50 game and we’ll release the rest in pieces over the next year.”
That was also like 25 years ago.
I love how everyone dumped on the Switch 2’s pricing when it was announced (not here — this was on another site/community) but as soon as it launched, the sales numbers exceeded expectations.
Honestly Nintendo didn’t price it high enough — it was clearly not priced as high as the market would bear. It’s making such good sales because people consider it to be a solid value for what they expect to get out of it.
If I hadn’t just gotten a Switch 1 (OLED) 9 months prior, I might have gotten one. As it is, it’s a minor upgrade and I see no reason to upgrade at this point. But a lot of people are.
Fortunately, the game I play, Animal Crossing, isn’t hard coded to the Switch’s limitations. I think it was always meant to be used on an upgraded console. Playing it on PC/Mac, people have gotten it up to 8K without modifying the game in any way, just running it on a more capable machine. (Macs are particularly good for emulating Switch as they both use the ARM64 platform, like your phone probably does. PCs do tend to have more powerful GPUs, so they can mitigate the additional emulation, not just going from Switch to Windows, but from ARM64 to x86-64. But Macs are already halfway there.) I can’t do 8K… my monitor and my MacBook both do 1440p though, which is 4X the Switch 1’s native 720p. It doesn’t look that much better (the textures are optimised for 720p) but it does perform better. Loading times zip by. If there’s a Switch 3 and it does 4K and it still has backward compatibility to Switch 1, I imagine Animal Crossing will do similarly well on that. Though, I kind of hope they make a new Animal Crossing title entirely.