Topic: Game Prices

I never really thought of this, but how much will a standard 3DS game cost? Maybe as much as Wii games, around 50 dollars?
And then theres Virtual Console and 3DSWare. Will it be a very dramatic price increase?
I hope that the games arent over 60. That would be a little high. Meaning, If you bought a 3DS, Extra Styluses, and a game, it could be around 370. Ouch.

$50 per retail game? No thanks. $40 or maybe $45 for Nintendo premiums (i.e. cash cows like Pokemon and Mario). The prices for the system, games, and DLC are going to be the potential deal-breakers on this thing for me, as amazing as it sounds.

I'm predicting about a $40 price for an average game at launch. Maybe it'll come down to $30 after a year or two, but first-party and Square Enix games will stay at $40. But that's just my hunch.

@Odnetnin
Good speculation, I'm guessing for 35$-40$, but that might be for shovelware.
I am 100% sure it won't go over 50$. For 3DSware games, I think the prices will probably be the same.

30-40, same as usual.

Hopefully.

But the prices wont stay the same as the normal DS games. A normal DS game costs about 35 at launch, then 30 later.
I agree, 40 would be nice.

By the way, I recently saw Pokemon FireRed and Pokemon Emerald at gamestop for 45$ each.

@Robo Thanks. And goodness knows how much gimmicky 3D shovelware will be brought on by this new system. I agree that it would be stupid to price a handheld's games in the same immediate range as a console's; defeats the purpose.

I'm also guessing DLC will get much more expensive if 3DSWare can actually be taken seriously as a platform this time around. Probably around $8 an average game and up to $20 for juggernauts like Cave Story, World of Goo, and Pokemon Rumble were on WiiWare (not saying they're the best games on the service, even though I think the first two are up there; they're just much-hyped, popular, and expensive games). Since right now DSiWare is going up to at least $12 which is almost half the price of a regular DS game, $20 isn't an uncalled for estimate for assumed $40-45 3DS cartridges.

Last but not least, I say we can wipe $200 off of our system-price wishlist, hope for $225 at the best, expect $250, and don't be too surprised at $275 (but that's not to say I'll buy it at that price).

I wanna be the next Michael Patcher!

I find it hard to believe the launch price won't be a number that can be divided by 50.

I'd be happy to pay almost the price of a Wii game for 3DS games but I don't think it will cost as much. Still, some of them look really good and I would happily pay that much. As for 3DSWare and VC stuffs... guessing time!

GB: 300 Nintendo Points
GBC: 500 Nintendo Points
GBA: 800 Nintendo Points
"Classic" Games (3D Remakes): NES: 600 points, SNES: 900 points
3DSWare: 200 - 1500 Nintendo Points

I'm worried that they'll say the built-in SpotPass and StreetPass adds to development costs, thus raising the price to $45-50 per cart to pay for the "online functionality". Hopefully not, but it's certainly possible they'll up the game prices to $50.

@skywake: Who said the "classic" games were gonna be NES or SNES games

I think it will be more like

• GB: 500
• GBC: 800
• GBA 1000-1200

_{that is, if they're smart}

I'm guessing they'll charge 500 for both GB and GBC games

My assumption was that they would be priced based on bandwidth and value. An original GB game should (IMO) cost less than a NES game because they are generally smaller and less complicated. The Gameboy Color had games that were slightly bigger and maybe comparable to the NES. The Wiis VC sells NES games at 500 points so (again IMO) it would make sense to price them around that.

I don't see anyone wanting to pay 1000-1200 Nintendo points for GBA games though. They are smaller than N64 games and the vast majority of them are about as complicated as SNES games. Think of it this way, Advance Wars came out in 2001 and would be an 4MB download. Paper Mario came out in the same year and is a 40MB download. Considering Paper Mario costs 1000 Nintendo Points on the Wii's VC it would be pretty damn stupid to charge more than that for Advance Wars..... just saying.

For the retail games it is kind of a toughie. On one hand, hardware wise, the 3DS seems to be notably more capable than the Wii. on the other hand, the 3DS is, at first at least, limited to a 2GB storage medium which is half of what's available on a Wii DVD, but it's still half a gig more than what was available on the Gamecube. Add to that the fact that the lower resolution that the system is running at would mean that art assets would consume less space. The question is, if the 3DS is providing gaming experiences on par with those on the home consoles, are they justified in charging full console game prices for them, or will the market just not accept it?

To tell the honest truth, with a $250 - $300 price tag, and the features it provides, It seems a lot less like a hand held game console and more like a game console that happens to be hand held. Yeah, I know that sound a bit like I'm arguing semantics, but if you really think about it the sorts of experiences the 3DS will provide are simply not reasonable on home consoles, at least not until 3DTV technology truly matures. I don't know anybody who currently owns a 3DTV, or is even in the market for one; as long as the technology has the limitations it currently does, I don't see 3D gaining much acceptance outside of the theaters where the price is somewhat reasonable, and on hand held devices where the limitations of the current naked eye 3D display technology are acceptable. Thus the 3DS seems to be a hand held simply because it has to be.

The final issue is with development cost. If we as consumers are only willing to pay hand held game prices for 3DS games, then developers are mostly only going to be able to offer hand held game experiences on the platform, even if the hardware is capable of more. Publishers just won't have the opportunity to see a return on their investment if they have to sell their games at $35 to $40 to put forward the kind of budget necessary to produced a fully fleshed out home-console-like experience, especially when you factor in the increased cost of publishing on a cartridge based system.

I really don't know what the answer is on this one. On one hand I want those fully fleshed out gameplay experiences we're used to seeing on home console, on the other hand, I'm not eager to to have a fourth platform with $50 and up games to support.

Totally agree with ByDarwinsBeard's points... except that Wii games can be full dual layer DVD size which is 9.4GB. More than just double the capacity of a 3DS game. Not sure how much of an impact that will really have though considering the vast majority of Wii games are only on 4.7GB disks and most of them don't use the whole disk.

We should also remember that 2GB is just the initial peak capacity of the cartridges. Some games will use smaller cartridges in the same way that some games on the DS use 8MB cartridges despite the largest games being 512MB. Still, you'd have to wonder how many budget retail games using ~40-60MB capacity cartridges will be produced if 3DSWare is even remotely successful. I think its very likely a lot of those smaller games will end up on 3DSWare where the shovelware is hopefully buried under poor user reviews......

DarwinsBeard definitely has some good points.

The console is releasing at the same price the Wii did in Japan. It wouldn't be to far off to assume that games could cost up to $50, same as on Wii, especially for first party titles. I'm not happy about it, but if I get a similar experience as I would from a $50 Wii game, I'm ok with it, I suppose.

Ah, good point, I'd forgotten about that. Not many Wii games have used a dual layer disk though, right? the only ones I know about are Brawl, Prime Trilogy, and Metroid Other M. I'm sure there's more though. It's just not something I greatly concern myself with.

They already confirmed that the 3DS games will cost most than DS games, so yeah probably the same price as Wii games.