For everyone chiming in with piracy (which I support): Layden is more calling Nintendo fans “junkies” than advocating for 80$ prices. His message (even in the face of Ryan’s LSG push) has always been “first party exclusivity sells consoles”.
Won’t they, though? Even disregarding the option of piracy, while new games will be $70 or $80 or whatever at launch, they go down eventually and Steam pricing has always been better than console.
Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:
Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation
Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game
In every other way it would lose the comparison.
With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)
For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.
That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.
It’s been a couple years since I tried PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation, but when I did it on PC was the compatibility of the emulator rather than processing power that caused most game to not be playable. It ran Katamari Forever really well, so I’m hoping I can get it running on the Steam Deck, too!
J2ME are old dumb non-touchscreen phones. My last one was Sony Ericsson j108i. And just now reading the Wikipedia entry, it was actually the last non-smartphone phone by Sony Ericsson! Nice.
Damn, the nostalgia is real. And the design still looks much better than smartphones which look pretty much all the same. Back then, phones had personality.
The Sony Ericsson phones in particular had very advanced J2ME support that I didn’t see that much difference between that and my first smartphone (Nokia C5-03). Not that there weren’t differences, the smartphone was definitely more advanced, but it wasn’t that huge of a leap.
I’m not schocked by a game costing around 80$ as that’s already what a new game costs in my country.
I remember buying Final Fantasy 8 almost 30 years ago for above 90$ as a teenager.
I also kind of remember that NES and Super NES games were really expensive.
I’m not saying that I want the price of games to increase though and I think it’s weird that Nintendo is doing this when their games clearly aren’t the most expensive ones to create.
I know I won’t be buying a Switch 2and I think people should vote with their wallets.
Have you seen the average Nintendo game? Unless they’re buying all of their developers solid gold keyboards to work on, I’m not seeing where the price justification comes from.
Game pricing hasn’t changed much, sure. I paid $70 for n64 games in 1996. But volume sure has
FFVIII sold 6 million copies in its first year, a huge commercial success, and has sold 9.6 million lifetime Ever juggernaut games like Mario 64 - 12 million copies. FFVII - 12.6 million Pokemon red blue green combined - 30 million Madden 2007 - 7.7 million (interestingly EA does not release sales figures for modern madden games, probably because sports games seem to make far more money from micro transactions than sales. NBA 2k for example sells around 7m units a year but is one of the highest grossing franchises in gaming)
More recent games:
baldurs gate 3 sold 15 million copies Elden ring 20 million Pokémon sword and shield - 27 million Diablo 3 30 million The Witcher 3 50 million Skyrim 60 million Rdr2 70 million GTA 5 200 million
So when people cry “wahh, videogame prices need to rise because inflation” remember that they are stupid and overlook the very basic fact that 20-30 years ago gaming was a niche activity that got nowhere near the volume it gets today. Any single game selling 50 million copies in the 90s or early 2000s, let alone 200 fucking million, was an insane pipe dream
Your friendly reminder that gaming back in 1998 was still not selling millions of copies as compared to now and revenue has for gaming has been rising significantly since.
Cool, now do the cost of everything else and compare then to now and you might have some idea of why $80 for a video game is a bitter pill to swallow.
Friendly reminder that games from 1998 were just games and didn’t have endless predatory mechanics designed to cripple the game in some way to extract money from you after you bought them too.
Needlessly absolute take. Yes, there’s going to be parents, who’d rather pay extra than look into what other games they could give their kid, as well as loyal Mario fans, who will pay pretty much any price. But there’s obviously also players who do weigh up their options based on price, and who will make different decisions when they have to decide between two titles, when one of them is cheaper. Especially with the additional invest for a new console and the more dire economic situation, I could see many players not buying into the Switch 2 at all.
If I have to pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2, I will pay $80 for Kirby Air Ride 2. I have waited 22 years for this game, there's never been anything else like it.
It’s the only platform I have to play it on, and switch doesn’t support the new space age expansion.
It did get many of the 2.0 updates, like the extended belt reader, free circuit wires, and all inserters are filters.
As far as acceptable, I love it. I’m sure I can’t build the crazy 10k science per minute monstrosities I’ve seen on youtube, but I’ve never really run into an lag issues with the bases I’ve built.
I imagine it’ll run much better on the Switch 2, given how well it runs on my Steam Deck, though I imagine that it would take a lot of adjustment to get used to using joystick controls versus the touchpad controls of the Steam Deck. Perhaps however the new ‘mouse-like controls’ work will be more helpful in that regard, but I can’t imagine even that would match the precision of a trackpad.
Don’t intend on supporting Nintendo’s crazy price increases myself, and will only get a Switch 2 if a way to hardware mod it becomes available, but I think it’s a bit ironic that the one non-first party game someone would specifically want to play on the Switch is also the one that not only never goes on sale, but also got a price increase.
I got a Wii for Christmas years ago. Never used it much. The last Nintendo console I bought was a game cube. You can easily live without Nintendo. They’re definitely decent games. Just not for that price.
You underestimate how many people literally cannot stop themselves from playing Mario. I’d hope it’s mostly children begging their parents, but I have a feeling there’s a decent amount of 30 year olds with disposable income and zero impulse control in there.
I introduced mine to undertale and other stuff like cuphead, old school sonic games and SNES emulators. We dont care about latest Mario’s, but he does have odyssey.
The Switch was the generation where I really started to have adult money, and while a lot of the games I got were lower-priced indie titles, I did get pretty much all of the big 1st party titles.
There’s a reasonable chance I get a Switch 2, but I’m not gonna be buying a lot of games over $70, and the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off. I suspect I’ll be buying fewer games this generation, and I’m okay with that.
It’s uncommon, absolutely. But I bought Super Mario Odyssey around the third time I got an alert that it was on sale, for $50 or so. This took a couple years, so it’s reasonably rare, but if the future looks like the past, it will happen
Streamers and YouTubers are mostly who I blame for this. They are influencers who showcase the games and it makes their fans want to buy it.
I can’t count how many times I’ve read online that so many people refuse to buy some game, then I go on YouTube and see like 5 YouTubers playing it day one, because they (or maybe even a fan) bought it.
I’m going to try very hard not to be, but I’m definitely the type of person you’re describing. That Nintendo direct had me drooling at the new Mario kart and donkey Kong games, and nothing hits like a zelda. Super mario wonder was a delight.
I only hope I can emulate this system relatively quickly. I am not a man of strong willpower.
That’s why I’m just not looking at these new games. It would be interesting to know how they’re tackling an “open world” Mario Kart! But I already know it’s too expensive for what I’ll get out of it, so taking a look will only be bad for me in the long run.
Don’t feel bad for liking things. Your post kinda bums me out. Don’t let all this negative hype impact what will make you happy. If you can afford it. Do it. If you can’t then yeah don’t, but we as people are allowed to enjoy things.
I do! Many of my favorites are indie games, I’d say more than not. But I guess there’s some things that you can’t do without a massive budget or many many years in development, because many nintendo core franchises just aren’t beat in quality in my opinion, at least for some entries.
Imagine going back to exclusivity with gaming consoles. PCs, and by extension, Steam won the console wars, and Nintendo is just trying its damnest to hold on to the last gasp of gaming exclusivity.
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