Topic: Well the games are going down in price..

Even the dreaded Mario Kart World, you can now pick that up for £59, and all the other biggies are significantly reduced too (kinda wish I would've waited now, everything I've bought has been reduced) don't think the machine itself is that much cheaper maybe £20, (no japanese prices here then!)
What do you think this means for a system that is only 6 and a bit months old, I don't think it looks good at all.
All the fans are clamouring for a new Mario or Zelda but I think you'd be lucky to get even a whiff of them until 2028 at the earliest, and we all know how good Nintendo are at dragging their heels when it comes to their beloved franchises.
Nope doesn't smell too healthy to me.

All is lost!

Where was I?

Spoiled all!

Spoiled all!

As for the game prices - honestly I find the discussion about this a bit strange as people are always quoting the absolute maximum price and not the actual price being offered. You can almost always get physical games cheaper than the RRP in the UK. People were complaining about £70 games for the PS5 but IIRC you were similarly able to get them discounted not long after launch. Also not quite sure on your point because Nintendo generally does well in the physical market, especially Mario Kart which is consistently in the charts.

Mario not until 2028? You think Nintendo will wait 11 years between mainline 3D Mario games?

This is common practice in the UK for...pretty much every Nintendo game. They all come down by a certain percentage a short while after launch and then tend to hover around that price with a further reduction when it's at least a year old. This applies to the big name retailers.

I was shocked to see games that are approaching 8-9 years old still at a rock solid $60 in some US retailers. You really aren't kidding when you say Nintendo games never come down in price!

It's common in the US, too.

Almost every store has some way to save about 5-10 bucks on brand-new games, with the possibilities only multiplying once the game has been out for awhile.

Even Nintendo games.

Gamestop is doing a Pro member promotion right now for 20 bucks off Switch 2 Pokemon Z-A or Prime 4, for instance.

There has been some serious discounting of games in the UK for Switch 2 but mainly game key cards really for the big discounts. However even if games start coming down in price the hardware itself must surely increase in price as the Switch 2 has expensive storage and RAM chips and when they get to the point where they have to re-negotiate with the manufacturer, Foxconn or whoever it is, the price per unit will have to rise. In the UK we are seeing some returned stock go cheap but in a a few months prices will rise. I can see a standalone Switch 2 without game going from £396 to £450, maybe they will throw in that Switch 2 tour software. PS5 will rise too. I don't know about the Xbox Series X. I bought a Ryzen, motherboard and memory bundle for about £60 from aliexpress after cashback as an offer last April and looking at the price now its £160 which admittedly may not be an offer price. That increase in mainly down to the DDR4 memory (yes DDR4 not DDR5), 2 sticks of 8GB DDR4 3200Mhz were included. Switch 2 uses DDR5 memory which has seen by far the biggest hike in prices.

I can see a official bundle price of £499 with a digital game and perhaps discounted to £460 regularly. £399 will be a big discount price i.e. returned stock. However we are starting to see the sales figures for Christmas for Europe and they are neither good nor bad just a sort of 'meh' amount of sales. France seem's very bad. They went for the Switch 1 in a bigger way than the UK initially at least. There does seem an awful amount of Switch 2 console inventory about in the UK. Even though my local CEX store had some empty shelves in their cabinets after Christmas that seemed to be more retro consoles that had sold and still had Switch 2s yet the OLED Switches and Lites had sold, there were still normal Switch 1's available. I go into CEX every week sometimes 2 and see very little interest in them, the queues can be very long. Most interest seems to be smart phones.

I feel like the Switch 2 has had a shaky start in the UK but we shall see. I certainly expect this year to be much worse though for all players. However surely the biggest market to be damaged is PC, the prices there for memory and storage has already shot up hugely, those building new PCs are facing hyper inflation in component prices. What could have been a £1200 PC may now be a PC for £2000-3000. It's going to be tough to survive in that retail sector I feel unless you are doing commercial/office sales too of PCs.

Game price reductions are pretty common after a few months in my area, if I recall correctly. This is nothing new, and the Switch 2 is performing fine I think 😀.

@BonzoBanana The Switch 2 doesn't technically use the DDR5 RAM that desktops use, it uses 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM designed for mobile devices for its power saving. I believe that will be the reason the Switch 2 will avoid some of the price hikes and Nintendo's aggressive over manufacturing of the system has helped in that regard.

DDR5 RAM while it has seen a massive jump in price still hasn't seen the jump that GDDR RAM has. So I believe the days of unified GDDR memory for games consoles might just be limited for this very reason. I feel we might start seeing the return of larger hybrid cache memory on the CPU's and reduce the memory down to smaller unified pools of DDR RAM.

What I can foresee happening is memory manufacturers focusing on only building the GDDR RAM the Ai data centers are asking for and hold back producing memory for other things and artificially increasing the price of the memory out of greed though.

Only time will tell.

As for the OP's argument that the prices are going down being a bad thing. I'm confused by this logic, if the prices don't go down people complain about how Nintendo never have sales and lower prices but now you're complaining because of what is essentially january sales? (people have been asking for this and Nintendo has decided to listen)

You don't don't really buy a games console as a value investment item to make money on, it has just marginally better depreciation value than a new car purchase so I just feel this is a nit picking exercise.

Yay, the 19th thread talking about how Switch 2 is doomed for reason X.

I wish I were seeing those magical super deep price cuts on first party games here.

I found TOTK for 50 bucks a month after release without even trying so...not sure what you're trying to do here.

@kkslider5552000 I mean... TotK was 50 bucks digitally on day 1 so it's not surprising the physical sales matched that price quickly. Personally I eventually got TotK for $30 brand new which is one of the few really good sales I have seen for first party Nintendo games recently. Mild sales are common though.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true

@kkslider5552000 I simplified slightly, but vouchers both existed and were being massively advertised during TotK release. So most people who bought it digitally in the US effectively paid $50. The fact that the $70 game was still buyable with a $50 voucher was a big deal.

If only that were still true with Switch 2...

Ah ok.

I'll be honest, I ignored the voucher system entirely, especially since limited space made buying big physical games digitally seemed like a bad idea to me. (the only AAA games I have on Switch digitally are DBZ Fighterz, Saints Row 4 and Starlink, and all of them I got on particularly great sales years ago)

I'm certainly seeing some discounting of games that's also pretty normal stuff. Usually here in Aus most retailers charge about $10AU less than what Nintendo charges. And it's not uncommon for one retailer to stick their head out near launch and drop it by another $10AU again. But, if anything, the higher price of Switch 2 games means that this discount is worth less. And given the RRPs are sitting over $100AU now, if you're sneaky and grab some 15% off eShop credit you can get a better deal on the eShop

In any case, if the higher RRP for Switch 2 games gamble isn't paying off because consumers are rejecting it? I don't see how that's a bad sign. Maybe not great for Nintendo's margins, which I can only assume are pretty healthy given the ease of discounting that occurs. But certainly good for us as gamers. Sadly I think OP is wrong and, frankly, it seems to me that the level of discounting is no different than what it has been for years

If you think it's different..... I would say that the games they're playing to make you think you're getting a bargain are doing what they're supposed to do

Games go down in price. This is normal.

Haha I wish prices were going down. I'd love to get something like Tears of the Kingdom, Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe, or Link's Awakening at a discount, but everything is still full price or near it at all my local retailers. The same can be said for Switch 2 consoles, games, and accessories (save for the odd Game Key Card).

@BonzoBanana
Nintendo will bump prices on everything else once more before they think about upping the actual console price. They did it once, and I think it was the right call. Bump the prices on stuff like the pro controller, amiibo, camera, etc. - the optional stuff, before you touch the banner price that everybody sees.

For as dense as Nintendo can seem… they know darn well how a 500-dollar Switch 2 will be received in today’s economy.