It’s Thursday morning on April 3, and you are watching the Nintendo livestream their new game, “Metroid Prime 4: Beyond” on their upcoming console, the Switch 2. You decide to take a look at the lively chat, expecting to see comments on how good the graphics look, or how the new mouse controls are neat, but instead, all you see is an online protest, unanimously chanting the same message: “DROP THE PRICE.”
On April 2, Nintendo released its first in-depth presentation about the brand-new Switch 2 console. Showing off a plethora of new games and explaining the new functions and improvements over the original Switch, Nintendo’s presentation showed its audience just about everything — except for the prices.
As console generations become more advanced and games become bigger, gaming companies will charge more for the consoles themselves, as well as the games. As of this current console generation with the PlayStation 5, new first party games have been selling for $69.99.
Nintendo has always had a different way of going about prices, as they are normally seen as the home to the family-friendly consoles, going for more affordable prices than their competitors. The original Switch started at the price of $299.99, with first party games primarily costing $59.99, with the exception of “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” costing $69.99.
Later on the day of the Switch 2 presentation, Nintendo softly revealed the price of the new console would be $449.99. While the price of the system was enough to make most fans halt in their tracks on their way to preorder the console, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the price of “Mario Kart World” coming out to $79.99 for the digital release, going beyond the industry standard and breaking new ground.
Because the prices were not in the presentation, and information on prices were either in press conferences or buried in the websites, fans had to actively dig through to find prices, leading to misinformation and misunderstandings about game costs. Despite an enormous amount of questioning from fans online, Nintendo has chosen to remain quiet at this time.
In a podcast between former employees of Nintendo’s communication team, “Kit & Krysta,” Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang discussed the consequences of Nintendo’s decision to stay silent.
“One of the consequences of Nintendo being completely silent in all of this is that they are enabling the story to get out of their hands,” Yang said. “Now there’s going to be misinformation and now you have to do even more work as Nintendo to correct that misinformation.”
In the following “Nintendo Treehouse: Live” events, while Nintendo representatives are playing the recently revealed games over a livestream, fans have collectively gone to the comment section with their outrage, creating a unanimous sea of comments bringing attention to the price increase.
“It’s the thing that you don’t want to happen when you reveal new hardware and new games,” Yang said. “You want people to focus on the cool things that you’re showing about Switch 2, and it becomes a crisis when everyone’s attention is on this whole other thing and it’s giving it a very negative spin.”
