One thing I can believe is that AAA games have gotten really expensive to make, so it’s not surprising that companies have broken that sort of soft $60 limit that we had for a while. I’m not even against paying more for a good game. When an indie game for $20 can provide over 100 hours of enjoyment, it’s just getting to be a tough sell.
That pricing is really putting Nintendo out of its core market. The reason the Switch was an absolute smash is because it was and remained accessibly priced. The fact they’re charging $450 is really putting them out of the “hey that’s not too bad” audience. This is a wildly bad move on their part.
Yes, it is a price increase, but the inflation has been wild. For context, the Switch in 2017 for $299 is equivalent to $389 in 2025 dollars. It’s really been insane. The Nintendo 64 from 1996 was $199, or $404 in 2025 dollars.
While you’re not literally wrong adjusting for inflation, their “value proposition” is a bit out the window. It’s so close in price to comparable tech, it seems like a much more serious purchase. Nintendo hit it right with the Wii and the Switch by pricing competitively low. The Switch 2 should follow the same value quotient to be a runaway success. This is effectively what killed the Wii U. The Switch 2 could be destined to follow the same fate.
Even the mental trickery of “$399” would be more effective than “$449” for Nintendo in the long run. They have to question whether that $50 is worth losing marketshare. I think if they are keeping the game prices and (potentially) the cost of services like online higher than the entry point of buying the system should be lower.
Yes, but it doesn’t cost $389 but $450. For $389 I would’ve considered it, bot not $450. Also the bigger issue for me are the game and accessory prices.
I grew up breaking games to make them run under minimum settings. Subnautica has (or at least had) a Dev menu or some shit that you could make the game look like utter arse.
Got me like 18fps at 480p, worth it #playable for younger me.
If I get under 100fps at 4k now I’m unhappy. How times change.
Lol, same, I’ve played some games at such abysmal resolution it became a testament of how good the art direction was, making it possible to recognize things amidst that jumble of pixels.
Funny how we grow accustomed with what we have. I was hyper-aware of my disk usage when I had a tiny HDD, nowadays I’m like “Why am I low on storage???”, then I go check and find 200GB of junk I no longer need on my downloads folder. Whoops.
Yeah I have, for a looong while. I understand a stable framerate is much better than a “high” one, but like, were not talking about a “Low-end” PC here, we’re talking about the current, still marketed generation here.
How come 30’s still the target when all the marketing is talking about how powerful it is and how amazing the upscaling is? And it’s a fixed target on top of all that, like common man
I noted the issues with gearbox near the end of the borderlands 2 cycle and put them on my ‘I’ll buy it when it drops down to under $10 for everything’ category.
I have posted a fully compiled list for 2 that put me off further first day spending posted somewhere. I’m sure I could find it if needed.
Same. I loved 2 but the DLC started to get… dicey. Pre-Sequel was fun, but then kind of a let down and made me realize how stale the gameplay was and how dev practices at Gearbox were shifting. I ended up never playing 3.
I’d be curious to see your list, and how it matches up with my own half-remembered gripes.
Instead of going to find it… I’ll just do my best to list it from memory (and it’s not going to be complete)
ammo economy in general was ruined from the first game. The entire ‘guardian’ legendary weapon set were removed, and most class mods no longer have any ammo regeneration unless certain characters. Lots of guns now shoot multiple bullets per shot, making this problem even worse.
Backpack space was lowered from the first game, while equippables was increased. Overall space was increased with the bank included… but not by much. I think the difference is 2.
The rock, paper, scissors health types first introduced in the general knoxx DLC were really leaned into really hard, which means it’s very handy to have a weapon of each element type on your person.
These three were my major issues. It’s a LOOTER SHOOTER. I need to LOOT and SHOOT. These three points made it more of a chore to do the base game loop at higher levels, especially considering that most characters had only a couple preferred weapon types. Combining all three points meant I was usually balancing 3 weapons of different types so the ammo didn’t overlap with different elements so I could effectively shoot fleshy, shielded, and armored enemies… and then sometimes slag.
There are some other gripes about the skill trees being overall worse than the first game, the DLC’s eluding to the best fights from 1 and being really disappointing (looking at you Crawmerex), and the lack of any real changes in the enemies from the first game. Sure there were plenty of new skins, but the actions didn’t change at all.
I’m sure there were more, but these points were enough to show me that the dev team was moving in a direction I wasn’t particularly excited to play. The story and most boss fights were way better than 1’s. So there was some positive growth, but in terms of overall gameplay I felt that the game was a massive downturn from where I would have liked to see the game go.
I have never purchased a game at $70 so for $80 they can be sure as shit I am hard noping out of this one. I was a day 1 3DS (ambassador club!) and Wii U buyer. Really hope this backfires, so incredibly stupid
Scroll down a good amount, 79.99$ MSRP for Mario kart world. Thats not a guarantee they’ll all be 80$. The new donkey Kong is 70$. No official word on other games, though.
In Australia we had an au$90 price tier with only 6 titles:
Breath of the Wild
Pokkén Tournament DX
Fire Emblem Warriors
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Super Smash Bros Ultimate
Tears of the Kingdom
All their other AAA titles were au$80, for example:
Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Super Mario Odyssey
Pokémon Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet
Super Mario Party / Superstars / Jamboree
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe / Super Mario Wonder
Then smaller releases were placed at $70, for example:
1-2-Switch
Go Vacation
Fitness Boxing 2/ 3
Miitopia
WarioWare: Get It Together / Move it
You can see they used the $90 tier quite aggressively early in the piece and then scaled back significantly with almost 5 years between Smash Bros and Tears of the Kingdom.
At the same time they made sure the Marios (Kart, 3d, 2d, Party, Sports), Pokemons and other franchises with broad all-ages appeal were priced in the middle at $80.
To be honest I’m a bit worried about the pricing for Super Mario Kart World, the previous one was the beat selling Switch title and if they come out of the gate with high sales they may take the wrong lessons and try to lock in that au$120 price (a 50% increase!).
On the other hand they may just be price anchoring with the bundle. Having the standalone console priced at au$700 and the bundle at au$770 will let the consumer find ways to justify the purchase, they might say the console is worth $700 so the game is only $70, or they might argue the game is $120 so the console is really only $650. Either way will make them feel better about giving Nintendo the money.
I suppose the best outcome for the consumer would be for most people to get SMKW in the bundle and then hopefully the next title they release at that price point has lacklustre sales. If they see they sell more units at a lower price it can be a good outcome for everyone.
Because they are one of the most consumer hostile gaming companies. The only redeeming quality is their games are usually top notch. I personally refuse to give them any more money.
Nintendo has been pushing the limits of how far it can make things worse for their customers, and people are still locked in because of some of the first party franchises. (Zelda, Mario, Pokémon, etc.)
Frankly, I’m surprised that Nintendo fans aren’t more mad.
I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
There’s already a sequel planned and being worked on plus a multiplayer game set in the control universe where you play as a ranger of the fbc. And the Lake House Alan Wake 2 dlc will focus on the fbc office in bright falls as that’s where the where investigating cauldron lake from.
Considering every Half Life showcased Valve’s new tech in the Freeman narrative, one could argue Alyx was our Half Life 3. It had everything: the signature storyline, new gameplay, new tech. What more are we expecting from Half Life 3?
Rumors I’ve seen are they are going all in on the physics. Like, every object in the game has material properties like flammability that will react differently in the environment. Some rumors about some procedural generation tech being involved as well, but not to what extent it’s being used
You may be onto something. If we take away HL: Lost Coast, and both HL: Deathmatch versions, there are 9 titles.
With the rumoured title code named HL:X it makes me wonder how they’re going to announce it (granted these rumours are true).
I don’t know why would it have this mythical status. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Half-Life 1 and loved its remake Black Mesa even more because of how they transformed Xen into something actually likable to a point Xen was almost favorite part for me. Half-Life 2, while it was great game by any metric. What do people expect from it to be “something more”? For me System Shock 2 and Deus Ex from years prior are significantly more advanced and more immersive games. I could almost say the same for Bioshock which was inspired by those two. It’s only that much they can do to the game to still be Half-Life while elevating it to something “more”. Like, if they keep it just a shooter like it was, many might complain it’s too basic and if they add too many complex things to it like inventory, skills and leveling, it might not be Half-Life anymore as us old folks know and remember it. So, what to do? I have no doubts it’ll be an interesting experience either way, but people need to ground their expectations because of the above reasons.
Valve can surprise or even shock me with something new, a ground breaking innovation, but I really have no expectations.
Half-Life: Alyx showed that Valve still knows how to make a great campaign shooter, and it’s not like we’re spoiled for choice in that genre right now. At this point, a solid Half-Life sequel that doesn’t push the envelope would still be amazing.
I mean, sure, but that was VR specific game. Which I found mod for regular play with mouse and keyboard, but there is no friggin way I’m paying 60€ for something I’ll have to mod and play in its unofficial form. So I skipped Alyx entirely. I don’t care about VR and never will.
You’d lose a lot of the effect in mouse and keyboard anyway. Each combat encounter has to be tuned very differently from non-VR. But the point is that they still have a very good understanding of how to make this kind of game.
Did you actually play the game? Because if you watched the ending you’d see that it was absolutely was NOT supposed to be HL3. Instead it was setting up HL3…not that I believe this rumor. Not until it’s actually announced.
Remember, they released GTAV with 30FPS first to PS5 , then they sold an upgraded PS5 version @60FPS for an additional $10 (which is free on most games).
Not really. There’s a reason the PS5 $10 upgrade isn’t compatible with the older versions in terms of online play. They updated a lot of graphics and models plus the 60fps. There are a lot of comparison videos on YouTube if you’re interested in even looking. The most noticable are like, damage models in cars is better, smoke looks more realistic and was redone, fire looks and acts better. Lighting is much better. Etc.
This is false information. GTA V was backwards compatible from the ps4 version which ran at 30fps. Then they released an upgraded ps5 version that ran at 60fps. It wasnt a bad deal either.
Yeah but they still charged for the “upgrade”. A lot of gaming companies give you the PS5 version of a game for free if you already own the PS4 version.
That is only if the game released on both consoles simultaneously, the ps4 version of gtav came out years ago, they deserved to charge for the upgrade…
Still trying to shoehorn in a "runtime fee". That's not going to work and with this model it's pointless anyway. Just make it a 4% revenue for sales after $1 million. Same end results (actually potentially more in fees) without all the runtime issues. Make it apply only to a specific version and later and after a certain date and then you also don't have the retroactive problem and the massive blowback.
It works for that market too even without install fees, you just make it a percentage of revenue generated from microtransactions. It's still tied to the game.
Quick math shows that's irrelevant with a 4% revenue cap, as I pointed out in my original comment, and at best they will be paid the same as just doing a 4% revenue fee. More likely they will get some amount less than 4% from most devs.
The only reason I see for them going this route instead is to claim they are still royalty free, install fees aren't royalties. Which is BS anyway.
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