Topic: What if: Breath of the Wild 2 will be the Switch's first $70 game.

BotW was 69.99 at launch. and if BotW2 is 69.99, yeah well, who knows, it's probably worth it again.

Some perspective for this thread, US catalogue from 1996:
https://i.imgur.com/ePXA7Yz.jpg
Adjusted for inflation:
N64: $200 -> $354
Mario 64/Pilotwings: $60 -> $106
Mortal Kombat Trilogy: $75 -> $133

We have it pretty good

I mean BOTW is still more expensive than any other Nintendo first party game on the UK Eshop, so I would assume the same would be for BOTW 2. In any other context I dunno how Nintendo could get away with it, especially now when the Switch hardware is truly ancient, but Nintendo can just do this stuff and we have to accept it, because we can’t go to a different storefront to buy BOTW 2.

I don't think we have it pretty good now, I think we just had it pretty bad back then. Price equilibrium wasn't yet established in the market, so the invisible hand was at work trying to nail down the sweet spot. Plus, gaming was a much smaller market back then, so games didn't sell as much as they do today. Install bases were like 40-60m tops. Market forces have settled on $60, though some are trying to push higher (it would take a 25% reduction in sales to make it a losing proposition for them, and I doubt that'll happen unless everyone unanimously agrees to not buy $70 games, and to wait for a $30 sale for any game which attempts it)

@SKTTR
Ya, I don't get it. BotW will be the same price as every other Switch game- $59.99 USD. Pointless to speculate about something we know for a fact won't happen. Every major Switch game costs the same. Nintendo isn't going to stealth raise prices on this game. They could, but they're not going to.

@Pokester99
That's quite literally what my post did, I adjusted the prices for inflation.....

@JaxonH
The US has had an incredibly stable price on games for a long time and it hasn't ever really adjusted for inflation. It's a bit of a strange thing really when you think about it in terms of the price of everything else. It's also not really the experience of other countries.

If we were talking about prices in Australia we'd be talking about how in the late 90s games were up in the $120AU range. Something that continued up into around the mid 2000s. I've said this a few times on this forum but I remember struggling to find a copy of Twilight Princess around the Wii launch and paying somewhere around $95AU for it, which actually wasn't too crazy. Prices have actually dropped in real terms since then, most games are in the $70-80AU range. They basically crashed here in the late 2000s.... alongside the death of differently timed releases in Australia. I think I can probably thank piracy and region bypassing/imports of games like Brawl and Pokemon Diamond Pearl for that one

And that's before you consider the scope of games today, the way digital distribution has impacted sales and the creation of a market for smaller games without the need for a physical release. Also the role of backwards compatibility/classic releases and the existence of free to play titles. We have it VERY good now compared to what it used to be like

Note that I'm not saying that prices should go up, I'd rather they didn't obviously. I'd be particularly opposed to price hikes given the current climate. We're not exactly in a low inflation world economy lately it must be said. I'm just adding some backdrop to the discussion about a theoretical change in the price. A 10-15% price rise to an agreed price that's been pretty stubborn for decades despite inflation? In the context of the above? We're still in a pretty good spot all things considered

@skywake
I would say we've got it good comparatively speaking. But I don't see today as being particularly good or particularly bad in and of itself... I think it's right where it should be. If it was more expensive in the past, I'd consider that overpricing, and it just took us a while to get down to fair pricing. Paying $100 in the 90s was an absolute metric ton of cash to pay for a single piece of electronic entertainment. It's why so many of us only owned 3 or 4 games per generation growing up. I remember 3 games we owned on SNES, and 5 on N64. Only reason we had more NES games was my dad owned a pawn shop at the time and got them cheap.

I'm not sure where I stand on the inflation issue. Yes prices are rising, but that's not a good thing. It robs us of our stored labor. If cost of supplies was increasing, resulting in smaller profit margins, and they passed that onto the consumer, I could probably accept it, but when publishers are raking in record profits, it's hard to accept a price rise just because other prices are rising.

Kinda feels like a, "you're getting robbed elsewhere, I should have the right to rob you too!" situation when I see $70 games. Makes me very reluctant to accept it, regardless of where prices would be if translated from the 90's. Truth is, I wouldn't tolerate 90's pricing today. As a kid it wasn't my money and I didn't know any better. But try that now and I'm willing to bet a lot of ppl would balk.

Still getting it day 1. I bought the CE last time so it’s not like I paid 60 for the first one anyway. (And the soundtrack too…)

Still cheaper than a Neo Geo game, and it won't be a 2-D fighter

I would be, ok with it because at least you know (I hope) you would be getting your money worth, so many games are 60% and the content let alone the play value (Opinion) is not even worth it!

BOTW 2 would (Maybe) be worth that cash, not like I would have a choice anyway.

I'd wait for a sale. Who am I kidding, I'm waiting for a sale, regardless.

Inflation by itself doesn't really mean anything, it's just a measure of the value of money. What matters is how the cost of other goods move in relation to the value of money. When you talk about the cost of labour what you actually mean is wages growth in comparison to inflation/CPI. And the median wage tends to grow faster than inflation, generally. In the US it was technically higher adjusted for inflation in 2006 than the low in 2012 and it took until 2016 to overtake the peak in 1999. But overall there has been growth above inflation.

The problem is that generally the cost of a lot of things also rises faster than inflation. Housing being the big one which also happens to be most people's biggest expense. Same with anything that's very service heavy given the fact that wages typically grow faster than inflation. And obviously again, right now? Stuff is all over the place so the usual rules don't apply. GPUs have basically tripled in price in the last couple of years, cars have become about 50% more expensive or more. So most people are in a bit of a crunch right now

However, when you come across a particular good/service where the price the price has gone down relative to inflation? Hell, in my case being Australian even better having the ticket price itself drop and new avenues for discounts open up? You have to acknowledge it's a pretty nice time to be into that hobby.

Because like you said, when I was a kid getting a game was a big event. If you were super lucky maybe you got three games in a year. Maybe if you were super savvy you picked up some ex-rentals after a console generation had ended for ~$10AU or so, just whatever they had. These days the "ex-rental" market is the digital store front and that two year old game on sale for 75-90% off. The big event is ... well ... whenever I guess

The price of games is small enough that this generation complains about not having folders/tags/search to better organise/find games they own. The default mode is almost to buy games for your collection first and to play second. We literally sit through E3 presentations and are shown 3 major releases for the rest of the year and wonder if that's "enough" while there are games from last year that we never finished.

The cost of games being too high isn't our problem

@skywake
Median wages only increase slowly over time as a response to inflation, but it doesn't justify it. When prices get hiked by 17% for video games (which $70 games are that much of an increase- its not negligible), my job isn't offering me 17% more annual salary to compensate.

I do generally agree with the sentiment though. There are bigger problems. I don't think a $10 price rise is the end of the world. All things considered, we are rather spoiled, I must say. I just won't stand for a price rise principle, because they have no justification behind it.

But, ya I kind of agree. We are blessed in this era in general, thats for sure.

@JaxonH
My point is more that $60 -> $70 in one region after a good two decades of pretty stagnant pricing is not particularly significant. $50US was the standard pricing in the mid 90s, obviously more for cartridge based systems. Over that time inflation in the US was 77% and wages growth was a bit higher than that, ~120%. If it matched inflation over that period games would be almost $90US now. They aren't

Lots of reasons for that obviously. Significantly lower costs for distribution of which the transition to digital store fronts would have certainly helped. The ability for publishers to extend the life of their games through DLC and microtransactions, as gross as some of those practises are. The way that digital store fronts mean games are available to purchase for much longer than they would be if they had to be brought in store.

Anyways, I think we agree so no point beating a dead horse

@clianvXAi

Difference is ff7 goes down in price quite quickly. Not agreeing in other platforms is far less severe, you just have to wait.

Isn't Bayonetta 3 $70 ....? I got my pre-order for that in when it 1st went up on game at £50 but it's now £65 here!

I honestly doubt Nintendo's going to charge 70 dollars for the game, unless you count regions where games are normally 80 bucks in their currency. It's more likely that Nintendo will do it next gen, if they even give into the trend that Sony is trying to set. I'm fairly certain Microsoft hadn't raised prices for their games yet in the US, so I doubt Nintendo will... especially given how Nintendo themselves are generally late to these types of things. Just see how late they were in charging people for online, and for Live service models in games.