Mario Kart World
Nintendo
It was just announced that the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 will be $449 with a $499 Mario Kart World bundle, probably $50 than most people expected, and $150 more than the original Switch eight years ago. Sure, inflation, but now Nintendo may have gone too far, even for devoted fans.
Mario Kart World is currently being listed for $80 on Nintendo’s website. Another storefront says 80€ for digital and 90€ for physical, so that may be another $10 bump on top of that in some or all regions. Though weirdly, the new Donkey Kong Bananza is listed at $70, meaning this might vary game-to-game, which would be highly unusual. Perhaps the idea is that because the Mario Kart series is Nintendo’s most popular by far, they can get away by pushing that specific price up. But if they do it there, where else might they? When might the rest of the industry follow suit?
Gamers grumbled, but eventually got used to $70 larger-scale video games at the start of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2020 after many, many years of $60 being the standard. But just five years later, Nintendo pushing that to $80 or even $90 for some titles is a wild jump, and if this works, you will no doubt see other publishers adopt that as well, at least with a $10 bump at minimum.
Some are blaming recent Trump administration tariffs, but there’s no indication that’s what’s happening. This is Nintendo seeing what they can get away with, or simply barreling forward to create a new industry standard. The combination of inflation and ballooning AAA video game budgets does make it seem like another price increase would eventually arrive. But gamers are annoyed by this given that the industry makes you pay to access the internet on a console, sells subscription services on top of that and often sells microtransactions inside full-priced games. So other revenue streams have been cultivated over time. Now, consumers will be asked to bear this new burden entirely on their own.
This should get everyone nervous about this coming for the rest of the industry. There has been a long-running half-joke that Grand Theft Auto 6 will price itself at $100, simply because it can, introducing the concept of the bigger the game, the higher the price it can charge. There’s no idea if this is happening, but Rockstar has to be looking at this and saying, well, if Nintendo can charge $80-90 for Mario Kart, what can we charge for the upcoming biggest game of all time?
Nintendo rarely upsets fans to any great degree, especially when it comes to pricing which has generally been much better than its competition (see the $300 Switch), but $80, $90 for certain games is a massive leap forward in a way that has genuinely shocked everyone who learns about it. But once this bullet is fired, there’s no going back after that.
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