Nintendo of America Vice President of Product and Player Experience Bill Trinen addressed the pricing for a number of Nintendo Switch 2 games including the $80 price tag for Mario Kart World.This Substack is reader-supported.
Not the worst response, to be honest. Price should be related to content. The problem they have is that the content may not justify the price for a lot of people.
The problem with "price related to content" is that no one knows the content up front, so how do they know it's worth the price? They tried this back in the SNES days and it didn't work out; the market ended up stabilizing prices. The problem is, today's market seems to want to stabilize prices at a much higher amount; they're charging us "best possible content" prices, but we won't get "best possible content" on more than one or two games a year, if that. This is a bad strategy, born of desperation and market impatience.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. I know if I got a new Switch and the new Mario Cart, my kids would get HUNDREDS of hours of entertainment on that. Let's say you add both things and they play around 500-1000 hours on it over the next few years, that's maybe $.50 an hour. The return on that is OK with me. A lot better then $20 for a two-hour movie that you watch a couple times.
In my home, Mario Kart for Wii was played so much the disc wore out.
Not the worst response, to be honest. Price should be related to content. The problem they have is that the content may not justify the price for a lot of people.
The problem with "price related to content" is that no one knows the content up front, so how do they know it's worth the price? They tried this back in the SNES days and it didn't work out; the market ended up stabilizing prices. The problem is, today's market seems to want to stabilize prices at a much higher amount; they're charging us "best possible content" prices, but we won't get "best possible content" on more than one or two games a year, if that. This is a bad strategy, born of desperation and market impatience.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. I know if I got a new Switch and the new Mario Cart, my kids would get HUNDREDS of hours of entertainment on that. Let's say you add both things and they play around 500-1000 hours on it over the next few years, that's maybe $.50 an hour. The return on that is OK with me. A lot better then $20 for a two-hour movie that you watch a couple times.
In my home, Mario Kart for Wii was played so much the disc wore out.