Topic: Are these prices making you cancel your purchases?

Just to comment here, this is far more upsetting to me than the existence of Game Key Cards or any of the arguments along those lines these discussions attract. By several orders of magnitude.

People here concerned about Nintendo shutting down the eShop at some point in the distant future. Huge outcry about this theoretical thing that hasn't happened yet. Meanwhile movies constantly shift in and out of streaming services, sometimes get edited, sometimes disappear entirely. The quality seemingly dropping over time. AI edits and so forth, almost yearly price increases. Actually happening, not theoretical, and nobody cares

Buy movies on BluRay and buy your games digitally. People have it backwards /2c

@skywake
I get it. And honestly, I’m super backwards because I’m all for physical video games yet pretty much only digital for movies.

Makes no sense.

But it shows how I let emotions guide my decisions lol

(I’m also just not really into movies, but that still links up with the emotion thing)

@Jarodlaraus *****. There's no tariff wars between Norway and Japan or any of the countries Japan use to produce their hardware, yet they've hiked up the prices by 30%. No, our income hasn't increased by 30%, while overall cost of living has skyrocketed. There's a reason sales here are abysmal.

The world doesn't revolve around your favorite scapegoat.

It's an interesting point, but two things come to my mind in response:

• Why distinguish between movies and games? If you like a piece of media enough to care about being able to access it whenever you want, buy a physical version of it.
• In my middle-aged adult life, I find movies pretty disposable. Off the top of my head, and ignoring the Star Wars films (complicated example), I can only think of two films in the past 15 years that I've really thought worthwhile having a copy of for multiple viewings. Generally, I just don't watch films very much anymore. They were important to me during my youth, but whether it's just me, or a reflection of the movie industry (probably a bit of both), I'm just not that motivated by films anymore. But games... they involve hours and hours of engagement, sometimes in local multiplayer, that mean much more to me as a way to entertain myself nowadays, so having legitimate copies of my games, in a format that allows me to sell on the ones I feel done with (not that that happens often), is much more valuable to me.

On the discussion of Blu-Rays, I may have a small collection right now since I still live with my parents, but one day, especially once I have my own house, that collection will become gargantuan because I like Blu-Rays and owning all of the media that I like, especially anime 😄.

@Hapless,

"How often are you rewatching stuff"

Quite a lot compared to most people 🤣. I'm not rewatching a ton of stuff right now because I'm taking advantage of Mama and Dad's Crunchyroll to watch some newer anime, but sometimes I just like sitting down and watching something I'm familiar with 😄. And Blu-Rays mean that will be able to watch that stuff without an internet connection (small internet outages over the course of my life have made me paranoid about making sure I have plenty of offline entertainment). Also, I don't necessarily trust streaming services to keep the shows I like on them forever. Those companies decide when those shows / movies leave. If a show leaves Netflix or whatever, and I have it on DVD or Blu-Ray, I have the last laugh 🤭. Then there's the fact that inflation has made things way too expensive and I don't feel like having a lot of subscriptions (If I do subscribe to Netflix, it's for one month only when there's a lot of new stuff on there that I want to watch) that cost money every single month. I can handle my phone calling and messaging subscription (when I finally get it) and NSO, as well as maybe one or two months a year of Netflix and Crunchyroll (yeah, I admit I'm a bit of a penny pincher, but I do like buying expensive stuff like Nintendo games and anime Blu-Rays). Also, I would like to get married and have a few kids someday. If that happened, I would want to show my kids the "classics" (in my opinion) without having to pay for a ton of streaming services. Also another reason I like Blu-Rays that isn't related to rewatching: once the movie or whatever starts, there isn't any commercials 🤣. But if other people don't rewatch a ton of media and are completely fine with streaming services, then good for them. This turned out to be a small essay on why I like Blu-Rays, lol 🤣.

Turns out that Amazon is being a scalper now as Prime 4 (Switch 1 and 2 versions), Galaxy 1+2 and Mario Tennis Fever are all £80 each.

Isn't that simply MSRP? Matches the prices I see in Norway as well.

@Grumblevolcano
Yeah i've just seen the prices on amazon. Don't think they will stay at that price.
Smyths have them at £49. Even Switch 2 Metroid.

@skywake exactly this.

I had owned a few movies on Amazon digitally. They went in and adjusted the frame rate upwards causing a soap opera effect and/or used a motion smoothing AI program. I hated this and the movies basically were unwatchable. They wouldn't give me a refund or allow me to watch the film on the unaltered 24 fps. In my opinion they stole money from me at that point but the tos clearly says I'm sol.

This is just one of the reasons why this isn't a rhetorical issue or hypothetical problem. It's happening to people right now. When you don't own property, you have no control.

I am even more insisting on physical media now.

@rallydefault I am buying them.

@BonzoBanana Wait til Gabe dies. He already laid the groundwork to screw over everyone. Whomever inherits Steam will probably go ultra greedcore.

A few reasons why:
1. Gaming platforms are locked down anyways. Even if you buy a physical copy you're locked to that hardware platform. Of course theoretically you could crack open the hardware and make backups of your physical games but... you can also do that with your digital purchases. In comparison BluRay while technically DRM heavy it's trivial to get around and well understood and the alternative, streaming, is not. You have absolutely zero control over streaming. The content isn't even on your hardware

2. The difference between a digital and physical copy of a game, or even a physical and a subscription copy. It's nothing. They're all the same bits. At most you'll get a performance advantage going the digital route because generally internal storage is faster. With movies? All things being equal, the copy on disc is the best quality. When you stream The Lord of the Rings on Netflix you're not going to get a stream that averages ~70Mbps, and especially not if you're not paying the $29AU/mo for 4K. But that's what I get, because I paid $69AU for the Trilogy on UHD BluRay a few years ago (I would make a cost argument here but it doesn't work out cheaper. Also for Nintendo's games for some reason the physical copies are often cheaper here)

3. Games you've purchased digitally being pulled from you, while I believe it has happen, isn't really the norm. You download a game, you have the game. The only way you lose access to that game is if your console fails and they shut down their servers. They can pull the services attached to the game sure, definitely possible and a concern.... but that also applies to the physical copy

With movie streaming services? Stuff moving on and off platform is a daily thing, it's constant. And they're also split across all the platforms. If I wanted to watch Terminator 2? That's on Stan ATM. The Big Lebowski? Streaming for free ATM on SBS at a low bitrate. The 2023 Mario Movie? Paramount+. Ponyo? Netlix ... it's a mess. On a Friday night if I feel like watching Tropic Thunder or something I can just put it on without having to worry about which service it's on, whether I'm subscribed, what the trials are, will they spam my email and also for that movie in particular whether or not it has been cancelled and isn't anywhere

So yeah, basically those reasons

@Misima
Thumbs up, bro

@Misima
For movies that makes perfect sense. Its why I have a Panasonic 4k Bluray player that does Dolby Digital and HDR10+ with a wall full of 4k blurays.

But games don't really deal with those sorts of issues because its downloaded, not streaming. And once its downloaded it essentially becomes physical media. Its on your micro SD express card, no different than a Switch cartridge (except its faster so better load times and less pop-in for games like Star Wars that stream assets from storage, hence why they didn't even consider a cartridge).

You can make backups of that digital copy, you can redownload it if necessary for many decades after purchasing it (my guess is at least 3 decades, maybe more- not to make new purchases but to redownload games you own). And even if thirty years from now, they happened to turn that service off, we would be at the point where those games would all be emulated anyways. Heck, my entire DS, 3DS, GC, Wii, Wii U and Switch libraries are backed up on modded consoles. I doubt that trend will change in the future.

Now streaming? That I will never be on board with. The example you gave is a good reason why. But more than that content can be removed at any time and replaced with new content. Streaming is what we should fear, not digital downloads which let's you download the data to a physical storage device to become your own homemade physical media.

@OmnitronVariant Are you for real here. Tariff affects everything even if it's not part of it. They factor all the cost into sales, shipping, marketing no single market is isolated from each other here. Whether or not they have tariff or not they can use that a part of their price hike reasons and you have no say in it. This is global market and if they can excuse tariff as part of the price hike they can do that and what are you going to do? Don't buy the product that is your choice but I know already you will gladly buy the product in the end regardless.

The games are linked to specific hardware though. I can only download wii games to my old wii when the service is running which I'm not sure it has consistently. However on pc you always have your content as pcs just evolve in performance its not a fixed platform. On proprietary platforms running software on later platforms can be much more limited based on the compatibility of the systems. You aren't running wii u games on Switch. However I'm not going to lie I choose PC as my main gaming platform not because of the games evolving in performance as the hardware improves but purely down to the far lower pricing of games. Every week I'm getting free epic games and perhaps 1 in 10 are worth playing. PC gaming is so cheap especially with emulation. I've kept my favourite gamecube and wii games and just emulate them nowadays on pc. Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 I bought end of wii life when they were really cheap. I think I paid 3 pound for one and 5 pound for the other. They are more expensive nowadays but still both can be purchased sub 10 pounds if you are careful. CEX charge 10 for one and 15 for the other currently. I remember buying quite a few wii games at a carboot years ago for 50p a piece. One of them was Mario Kart Wii. Actually I might have paid a pound for that one. You get my point though. I have a legit copy of the games I love and can legally play them emulated. However I admit I download the roms rather than make copies myself of the games I have. Sometimes I also use the US roms when I have European originals. Personally I only have a few games per system in the past that I still enjoy playing. Typically only have a dozen titles per console still hold my interest and when I totally lose interest in the game I will sell it.

I just read a five hour old article on Friday Sep 19th and the Switch 2 has been up for sale without any invitations or hoops on Amazon for at least 5 hours and isn't sold out on the US site.

That's pretty shocking to me. The console isn't that old and it's not instantly selling out? If they're still there tomorrow, that might be a sign that Nintendo really screwed up.

I think rather than screwed up it means Nintendo did well by providing tons of stock.

It's been almost 4 months and we're in that awkward spot where most of the early adopters have already bought one and we aren't yet to the holiday surge. Even with the current lull it's sold out some places, but it is past the period where it was hard to get.

Considering Switch 2's record breaking start of 6 million sales in 7 weeks, it is pretty much guaranteed to have one of the best opening years of any console. Just as a reference, Switch 1 sold 10 million total in all of 2024 and only 2 million in that equivalent 13 week quarter of 2024. Switch 1 sold 7 million in the first 7 months after release so Switch 2 almost caught up with that in 2 months.

If anything I'm glad that at least as of right now they are in stock, so that I can get one early next year assuming my current plans and budget work out.