Nintendo Switch games are very expensive and have every reason to be

When The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword launched for the Nintendo Wii in 2011, the motion-controlled adventure cost $ 49.99. This week, Nintendo announced a remastered version of the game for Switch: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, priced at $ 59.99, adding a dollar to the price for each passing year since the release of the original game.

Nintendo fans everywhere let out a sigh of resignation. Skyward Sword, a 10-year-old Wii game, is more expensive than it was when it was released a decade ago – and it will remain expensive, because first-party Nintendo Switch games almost never drop in price. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the port of a Nintendo Wii U game released in 2017, is still sold at full price almost four years later. Super Mario Odyssey too, as well as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Party and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe.

Everyone doesn’t like that. It actually looks wrong. Nintendo’s competitors, like Sony, routinely and permanently lower the prices of high-budget AAA games. God of War for PS4 was released in April 2018 for $ 59.99, but in October the price was permanently reduced to just $ 39.99. Today, it costs less than $ 20. Marvel’s Spider-Man was released in the same year and had a similar price drop of $ 20 in February 2019. Game releases for Xbox, PlayStation and PC tend to have big drops in prices in the first year, or not much later. It seems like standard industry practice. As buyers, we expect this, and that expectation makes Nintendo’s consistently high prices look shocking. As if Nintendo were being unfair.

But Nintendo is not being unfair. Just follow our example – because no matter how much we want to pay less for the Nintendo Switch versions of the re-released Wii U games, we don’t. We pay the full price and continue to pay the full price, regardless of the age of the games.

As always, math and economics spoil everything. According to Nintendo’s latest tax profit report, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold more than 33 million copies since launch – making Nintendo an unexpected fortune. And the game is still a bestseller: it is still the fifth best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch eShop and to this day it is the ninth best-selling Nintendo Switch game on Amazon.

To put this in perspective, one of the PlayStation 4’s best-selling games, God of War, sold about 12 million copies in June 2019 and is Amazon’s 23rd best-selling PS4 game. The PlayStation had to cut its price to keep buyers interested in Kratos; meanwhile, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has been selling in record numbers for the full price since launch.

Nintendo games are expensive. Everybody hates. Still, Nintendo has no reason to lower prices – it is selling more copies of its games than its competitors and making more money from each copy sold.

And, for better or worse, Nintendo fans got used to expensive games. On social media, we bitterly joke about the “exchange tax” that has a premium price on modern doors for older games. We often try to rationalize these higher prices – of course, Doom (2016) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt cost more on the Switch, but developers had to rebuild and optimize these games to work on Nintendo’s less powerful hardware. Sometimes we have to rationalize further: Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster costs less than $ 30 on Steam and PS4. The $ 20 price increase to $ 49.99 is the devil we do to play it on a portable platform.

Nintendo cultivated the expectation of expensive games and, although we don’t like it, we ended up accepting it. Consumers spoke to their wallets, and Nintendo heard us loud and clear: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is worth $ 59.99, despite being a decade-old version of a Wii game that originally sold for $ 10 less.

It looks wrong, as if Nintendo were being unfair – but the data doesn’t lie. We will buy it anyway and, once again, Nintendo will print money.

See too: Best Nintendo Switch Controllers for 2021