If the tariff is too great the cost becomes unspreadable. Spreading cost requires other regions to still afford the new price, and with numbers like this that’s unlikely.
About one-third of Switches were sold in the US. Spreading a 145% tariff means hiking everyone’s prices by 40-50%. That will murder sales in other regions.
Better to eat a 30% temporary loss that adds pressure on Trump to reverse-course than to eat an even higher loss and face backlash worldwide for making others pay for Trumps idiocy.
To add to this: I’m in a region where the base Switch 2 price is already very unaffordable when you compare it with our wages and cost of living. And then you throw in the games… which Nintendo conveniently left out prices of for us (they did list the bundle though, so I’m extrapolating from that). But Nintendo won’t care since we’re already a very small market. But if they did that in more markets to the point of being unaffordable in most places? Sales would crash. There’s a reason they have a cheap region locked variant for the Japanese market.
If they tried to spread the cost amongst everyone no one would buy the switch is already borderline unreasonably expensive. Limiting the price increase to only the tariffed country means they’ll only lose out on the American market not the everyone else in the world market, which is bigger.
Seriously I just explained why they don’t have a choice, and you’re like, nah they’re still going to do it, even though I literally explained why that can’t happen. Did you even read my comment?
The steam deck is a portable computer the switch can only play switch games. Those games are hugely expensive, and the price is controlled by nintendo who infamously never decrease their game prices even after 10 years.
Why even try this? You can refund games within two hours of gametime or two weeks from purchase date. The moment someone launches the game, it’s immediatley obvious that it’s not Helldivers and smashes that refund button.
If a kid’s got their parent’s credit card, I doubt they will bother with requesting a refund. They’ll just smash other ‘buy’ buttons until the game they want is downloaded. I’m sure some adults are like this, too…
It’s going to get reported and found by Steam pretty quickly. Steam already holds onto the money from sales for 2 weeks in case they need to issue a refund. Once they discover the scam, which will take less than a week, they won’t hand over any of the money.
There’s probably a decent number of people that buy a game and don’t install it immediately. I often do this when something is on sale. By the time they realize they didn’t get what they were after, it may be outside the refund window.
its not insane unless you’re doing completionist stuff, you can easily cap a few sets of armor for key purposes just with chest loot and some monster mashing. I created a second game on another user account after my first game (with duped gems, etc) and its not really grindy until you try to max out like a third set of armor.
you can get most of the battery cell upgrades by opening chests from exploring (and where the chests are becomes obvious if you collected a few old maps) and following the main story. The problem is exploring the depths isn’t all that fun. I never even used duping to get battery in my original game- by the time I explored the depths fully I was maxed out.
That’s it, I never played Nintendo games because I never had their hardware. For me personally it’s just not worth getting into their closed ecosystem. Basically same reason I never had anything apple.
Now let’s all pretend that MS and Phil aren’t buying up publishers to have another monopoly full of Xbox/PC exclusives. Tbf though, I think Sony started this whole exclusives thing and really pushed hard for it. They do, however, seem to be relenting now by publishing their games to steam.
Sony buys up studios for their talent not their IP. Bungie/Destiny is the only exception. They have a strong history of empowering their developers to release better games than they did before.
Microsoft is the opposite. They buy up studios / IPs and run them into the ground.
Sony makes them. Microsoft buys them. Two very different things. Quality is a separate issue, but related In that Microsoft apparently has a hundred billion dollars to spend but can’t make a great game by themselves in the last two decades. They have no taste for it. I hope they prove me wrong. I don’t want to see them become a monopoly of mediocre games that we have to subscribe for. I also don’t want to see Sony without competition.
Can’t agree more. I don’t think there’s a studio under MS that’s done better under their leadership/portfolio than they’d done prior to their acquisition. The studios created to shepherd Xbox franchises that original studios move on from generally have never matched the highs previously seen either.
I also don’t appreciate them hoovering up franchises, via acquisitions whilst failing to develop much new that’s if any note. All it does is condemn a growing back catalogue to mediocrity or have them disappear into the vault.
Sony aren’t perfect but their studios tend to produce top tier games that look and feel like they’re a tier above most, making the most of their “exclusivity”. Most (all?) their major releases are their own franchises developed in house too, and it feels like there’s a steadier turn out of new, quality IP to boot.
You don’t get it, though. Microsoft will put everything on Gamepass. Sony fanboys can suck on that!
Ignore the fact that them buying-up all these studios is objectively bad for our hobby and the industry, and that Gamepass has been touted as being objectively bad by everyone in the industry because studios receive a minuscule amount of revenue from it and that it disadvantages indie devs.
The only thing that matters here is that my metaphorical sports team beats your metaphorical sports team.
I mean Sonys last purchase was Firewalk Studios, who was working on a game that hasnt been publically shown(however, sony was given a preview of it privately) and they havent released a game yet, so they technically bought out an IP unless you claim they already hit the reset on whatever project they kept under the sheets.
Borderline I’d say, but if it’s not public Sony is buying based on devs / potential, not existing sales or hype, and at that point they are bankrolling a new IP and assuming all those associated risks.
It does if they decide to remove the windows conpatibility that was announced beforehand. So far they havent, but if they did, it would be treated the same.
As a Switch owner, fuck this. This is reason enough for me to stop buying games on the Switch and go full piracy/emulation mode. I don’t have any Denuvo games on my PC and I am not having any on my Switch.
to be fair, people were VERY excited about those two new games. I can see how someone can talk themselves into splurging for it, especially if the Switch is their only handheld. Prices of consoles seem to be going UP over time instead of down, so if you think you’ll want one when there are more games, it’s actually more frugal to buy NOW before chip shortages and tariffs drive the price up even higher.
The only Switch 2 game I even have right now is Deltarune. But I know I'm buying Kirby Air Riders, and I figured it'd be best to make sure I get the console right away in case tariffs fuck anything up by then.
This is me. In my country it cost a lot more to buy here so i imported mine. I just wanted a new Mario kart but the new one kind of suck and donkey kong is… Well it is a game but not very interesting after the novelty has worn off. I play more on my steam deck and kind of regret the buy of a switch 2. Got a huge backlog of switch 1 games too but I never get to the TV to play, too much focus on the computer.
Not even necessarily F2P. Depending on what you have access to, Epic, GOG, Prime/Amazon Games, Steam, Itch, and a few others all release freebies nearly every week. Some of them are even AAA titles.
If you’re not supremely picky about what you play, you can get hundreds of free games over time.
Since I started !freegames I’ve not bought a single game but my backlog is growing way faster than I can play through it. Not a bad first-world problem to have, really!
Blizzard as it was has been dead for a while now. Jeff Kaplan leaving suddenly was irrefutable proof that OW2 was going to be flaming dogshit and it was and still is.
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