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Switch 2 Pricing Discussion
The price of the Switch 2, at $450, is actually not bad at all. The closest comparison to it is the Steam Deck which is more expensive and not as performant. The Switch 2 has a higher refresh rate screen with VRR that is larger in size and resolution too. It's not an OLED screen, in relation to the comparable model, but it should still be pretty good. Then you've got the actual game performance too which Switch 2 will certainly be better at, I think that's a given.
I think we all would have liked to see it cheaper, but then again I never imagined that it was actually going to be as focused on power. I thought they would MAYBE go with a 90hz screen MAX. I definitely didn't expect them to have Metroid Prime 4 dropping with 1080p 120fps support. With or without any upscaling shenanigans that's still pretty damn impressive for a handheld like that. I think the price is pretty fair.
When it comes to the price of the games, that's getting a bit more on the iffy side. $80 really is too much, I think. It's a big ask. I am still of the opinion that instead of trying to go bigger and bigger with games, causing the jumps in price (alongside the obvious issue of inflation), development teams really should focus on making extremely tight and fun experiences that can be easily replayed. Nobody was asking for Mario Kart World to be an actually open world game with like shitty secrets to find if you veer off course or anything. Keeping it at $60 or even $70 while adding in all of the amazing stuff to the actual races themselves would have been honestly so much better. I am actually curious to see how much Kirby Air Riders is priced at, because I can see that actually being a $60 game with Sakurai at the helm. Dude knows his shit.
Then again, if $80 is going to get me 300+ hours of gameplay like Mario Kart 8 DX did, I don't think it's that bad of an investment on enjoyment. You go to the movies once and pay like $15 for a 2 hour thing that cost about the same as a video game, so it does scale to a pretty astronomical level. Not to mention, the game is one purchase that can be enjoyed by a bunch of people all at once. It sucks that it is priced so high, and that our purchasing power is so low, it really does. Is it still kind of fair though? I guess if you really want the game, yeah. It's going to definitely filter some people out, though, and I think that is partially why they included it in that bundle for essentially $50 instead. People were going to buy the damn game anyway, and now they're going to pay for a $20/year subscription too.
@Jens_Rasmussen the game prices are high. definitely. relative to the rest of the market, i have to consider kind of what the price means to me. i'm way more likely to buy a really heavily polished and unique game than something that's either woke slop or soulslike slop. nintendo always kills it and i always sink a lot of time into their games. i'm willing to pay $70-$80 for that kind of quality, but they shouldn't expect anyone to be paying that like every month. the last full-price game i bought that wasn't nintendo... i can't even remember. maybe like, doom 2016? i think nintendo knows this, too, they know they make fucking bangers all the time and they can charge more than anyone else does because of it. not saying that they should, but i do think it is also kind of indicative of massive bloat everywhere else in the industry and nintendo is pretty much just capitalizing on it. it's not like they've had massive layoffs and studio closures, you know what i'm saying?
the games being priced what they are is definitely more of a problem than the price of the console itself, though, which i think is actually pretty damn accurate for what is on display there.
as far as significant regional differences go, can you point to any examples? pretty much everything i've seen has a very similar conversion rate. the only notable difference is that japanese-only switch 2, but i get why that exists.
nintendo's had paid online since the switch, it's $20 a year. if you want to go crazy with the emulators and have "free" dlc for games then it's $50 but that's so far out of the realm of what i want that i just don't think about it lol. i'm actually on a family plan with some friends so i pay $10 a year instead. YES, paying for online play is far from ideal, but it's also 1/3 of the other consoles so it's kind of like whatever. $20 is not that much lol.
i'm pretty alright with paying a good chunk of change for something i know i will play a lot and really get my money's worth. i have my gripes with tears of the kingdom but, as my only $70 game purchase ever, i did get a shit ton of playtime out of it and did still enjoy most of my time playing it. i spent like $1000 on pso2 over the course of 4 years because i poured a shit ton of time into the game, we're talking like 3,000 hours. you got dudes out there who pay $15/month for FFXIV and buy the $40 expansions. so the question is really how much value do you think you're going to get out of paying that much for a video game? if it's a lot of value, then the price is kind of justified at the end of the day. i don't necessarily ENJOY being forced to pay more for something, but i'm also not going to sit here and act like it's not going to be worth it for me to do so. it's not going to be worth it for a lot of people, at least not as often, but for me i'm already pretty damn picky with the games i pick up anyway. it's just that nintendo's games are always fucking bangers.
