With all the Black Friday sales going on at the moment, our eyes have become well drilled in spotting great deals and discounts both at retail and on the Switch eShop, but we didn't expect to stumble across this.
Membrane, an excellent physics-based puzzle platformer that launched on the eShop back in 2018, has gone in the complete opposite direction. Usually available for the very reasonable price of $9.99, the game is currently sitting on the eShop at a staggering $250. Seriously, here's a quick screenshot of how it currently appears on Nintendo's site:
We're assuming, and hoping, that this is just a bizarre pricing error; indeed, the game is still listed at its usual price point of £7.19 on the UK eShop.
We've contacted the game's publisher, Perfect Hat Games, to clarify, and will update if and when we hear back. For now, though, you might want to consider some more traditional Black Friday eShop deals. You know, where the price goes down.
Thanks to RupeeClock for the tip!
Comments 79
Sounds like a great deal. Guess I’ll pick it up now!
This is the NFT edition.
Maybe it was supposed to go on sale for $2.50, but somehow got listed as $250? Idk
I'll take two please.
I want to know if they get someone buying at that price 😅
I would guess its a pricing error, must be a slow news day.
Maybe the developer’s country has suffered from severe inflation.
In all seriousness though, it’s still AU$12 in the Aussie eShop.
Cooking Mama Cookstar's (alleged) crypto mining walked so Membrane could run 🙏🏽
This is Membrane Shorts Edition by Super Rare Games limited to 1.000 copies
lol! $250 before Black Friday?! great publicity stunt! 👏🏼
Definitely an error. 7,99€ over here.
I bought this on a sale once for 90% off, £0.71.
Pretty solid little game actually, just not $250 solid.
The company have just been bought by EA.....
I don't even think you can have over $200 on your system so this has to be an error of some kind
I blame scalpers.
Ha! I noticed that because this game is on my wish list and I forgot to buy it back when it was like $0.10. I sort of guessed that $250 is so people see that price and go "what in tarnation???" as they fall off their tractors, but then later they'll put it on sale for a normal price and people will buy it because the price dropped like 1000%. What a deal!
What a clickbait
@MrGrim I dunno, I imagine the publishers "type in" the percentage discount on digital stores and the store sorts does the calculation for discount price automatically rather than having to work out and type in all the new prices themselves.
At least, that makes sense to how it would work in my mind. I don't know how the pricing actually works...Given it's the eShop though, a Nintendo platform specifically, they probably have a totally insane, backwards and inefficient way of doing it.
It's... an experience, this game is.
I bought this when it was $0.09. It's actually a pretty decent game. Well worth more than than the nine cents I paid, but not quite worth the current $250 asking price.
You mean I overpaid for this????? I thought it was a little bit of a light experience for $250.00.
@Onett bought it when it was 0.99 and it was fantastic. Though not quite $250 good.
@antonio2244
I don't think you know what clickbait means... The article is literally exactly what it says
@Fighting_Game_Loser ya think?
Thats insane in the membrane.
The developers believes in the game and wants to get rich asap 😂.
Who invited the PDI Check docs to make a Switch game?
Meanwhile in Mexico it costs 5000 pesos (exactly 250 dollars if the exchange rate is 1USD = 20 MXN). I would've expected it to be slightly more expensive here.
Oh man... I can't believe I didn't buy it up before the price increase. What if its about to go up even HIGHER? I should probably buy it up now before it doubles, or triples, in price. I don't want to miss out.
There's a shortage of digital copies, of course.
They do that so they can make it 100000000% off next week...
So they can put it on sale for 99% off of course
I didn’t know the ceo of perfect hat was a retro game collector lmao
DekuDeals list it at 300$ Canadian since the 2 of november (so 17 day so far)... It's all time low is 0.012$ Canadian
And you can get 1500 Nintendo Gold coin!!! YEAH!!!
It's actually a very good game. I picked it up at one point for about $1.
It seems I have amazing instincts for buying at the right time; I should get into stonks and crypto!
They've just done this so that they put it on sale for 99.9% off and still make some wonga..
Comma (EU) or dot (US) error on price of $2.50 in the submission to Nintendo for black friday sale. Apparently 250,- isn't the price limit in the eShop.
Ah well, at least the game gets some more attention.
I already own this game and now the price has gone up. can I sell this on cryptoexchange?
Looks like they made it around 2500% more instead of 25% off, which would make it around $2.50.
Digital scalping? Lol
Maybe they were going for $2.50 and they DID miss price ?
The real question.. did anyone accidentally buy it at this price? o.o
Feeling good about the 99 cents I paid for it!
Don't eShop accounts have a $200 balance limit?
So is it technically impossible to even buy this?
I have the game (pre price hike - definitely a smart publicity stunt) and can say its quality and a lot of fun for puzzle platforming fans.
That’s just the Canadian eshop price where every game is about $250
Maybe it was to get someone to write an article about it just like this one and get some eyes on their game. Just maybe.
I’m pretty sure I got this game for twenty five cents.
@Onett
Actually that why it's super simple and obvious what happened here.
They were going to put it on same for $0.25 or $2.50 and messed up. I've never used the developer interface for the switch e-shop, but all the ones I have used auto-fill in kinda weird ways if you leave out the decimal so that could be it, but most likely I was say that the person doing the data entry entered in the price they were selling for in some other currency (read the spreadsheet wrong). $250 Yen is about $2.50, for example.
Clever trick. It'll show as 96% off once it goes back to normal. The first ever collector digital game.
@Rhaoulos
No it wont. How much your game is on sale is based on the MSRP set when it first went to the shop. You can't manually change your MSRP on any e-shop other then to lower it, and even then it's generally not automatic and has an approval process. If you could this type of manipulation would not only be everywhere but e-shops would be getting sued constantly given manipulating your MSRP is one of the few business practices that breaks civil code pretty much everywhere.
Got this one for free, played for about 5 minutes and never touched it again. It's not awful but far from being relevant. Don't bother, it's probably a strategy to get attention.
@Onett Possibly just a typo $2.50 > $250, if they missed the dot.
Gasp!
Money laundering via eshop, just like on Steam!
Really though it's likely just a pricing error.
Well, it got Nintendolife and other media tallking about it - free publicity for an unknown game.
Sell 250 copies for $1. Or…. sell one copy for $250!
People are actually buying for $250 they're going to feel pretty dumb once the price is fixed they won't get refunds, and they know that, lol
When it returns to Its normal price, it will probably show up on the Current Offers screen or elsewhere because it will look like it's had a massive reduction. That might help generate sales. So, it may be deliberate.
I've heard of developers gaming the eshop to get sales by using discounts - so their games are recommended by the eshop. And in some cases that could be done artificially by increasing the price and then discounting back to the original price.
@HeadPirate It wasn't obvious, but I was just joking around. I would have loved to see it displayed as a negative discount though.
@Fighting_Game_Loser @KingMike
Recently the limit got raised from $200 to $250 (or equivalently in the UK, £180 to £225).
@HeadPirate
This Membrane change seems to have been an MSRP change rather than a sale, $250 is now the 'normal' price.
Nintendo eShop prices have risen across the board several times before in Japan due to rising taxes, so maybe Nintendo doesn't have anything blocking the MSRP being increased.
Well, that's a lot of nintendo coins at least! lol
@FroZtedFlakerZz look at the title and think again, it doesn’t say which game and also has subtitle “but why”..all news portals use titles like this so you have to open an article to find out what it is about (usually it is a title that sounds mysterious and then you enter to read and it’s something not worth reading)
@bluesun Ohhhh, ok. That's interesting to know
I bought the game on sale for 99 cents...I think I might have used my coins so I guess I got it for free.
@bluesun
Unlikely, but like I said, I've never used the actual Switch E-shop interface so anything is possible.
More likely the system just wasn't built for temporary price increases, so it says "normal price" while still having the MSRP at $20. It's a big deal to let someone raise their MSRP to falsely claim a product is on sale ... it violates civil code almost everywhere, and in most cases the retailer and the manufacture are both liable. I not a lawyer though, so their might be some weird exclusion for online stores I don't know about. I do know you can't do this on any online store I have worked with, and the TOS are pretty clear on that.
Tax-in pricing in Japan and other places that mandate it isn't displaying the MSRP (or sale price), it's displaying MSRP + tax. If the tax rate goes up, the price you see increases but the MSRP didn't go up. When they raised the consumption tax in 2019, Sony let you do a one time MSRP adjustment so the tax-in price was a round number.
Wish it could go back on sale for a dollar, I'd probably pick it up.
Welcome to The Price Is Wrong by CBS Electronics.
I'll buy that for a dollar!!! or 250...
Its $300 on the Canadian Eshop right now lol
@CodyMKW you actually can get refunds on the eshop. I've got refunds for 4 games that i've bought between 2017 and now.
@KingMike it is unless you use paypal. but i don't think anyone would go to that length just to get this game
If it were Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild I guarantee you people would defend that pricepoint lol
@HeadPirate
The price API (customer-side) marks it as a normal price rather than a temporary sale price at least. Will just have to wait and see if it does go back down, I guess.
There's probably plenty of examples of permanent price increases on the eShops though, having heard of quite a few they don't seem too rare.
Another specific example I remember: Shovel Knight, which is a case where the price even increased in America.
Even Nintendo themselves have raised the MSRP of their own games in South Africa for example, multiple times over. You can see the last two price hikes on dekudeals by setting the country to South Africa. No tax reason there, just Nintendo deciding the exchange rates had fallen too low.
But yeah, not a lawyer either, and maybe all this is just ignored for being digital prices though.
It’s free advertising, plain and simple. Look at the buzz it has created. I never heard of it and now I’ll see it on sale for $5 or so, and they got a sale. I would never have thought about getting this until now.
Or there is some hacker exploit in the game that they want to capitalize on before it gets taken down…
@Zadaris This was my immediate thought as well.
By Grabthar's hammer... What a savings.
@antonio2244
That's how they make money...
"What's that my sign spinning is too cool? It makes people want to shop here? Stop? Okay"
Also do you KNOW why? Why can't they put "but why..."? That's a very normal question
People like you just come on to complain, you knew it wasn't going to be BIG news, so why are you complaining?
It went down to $2.50 now, the price was just a mistake.
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