I guess I don’t play Mario then. It’s a pretty simple concept.
I got a Wii for Christmas years ago. Never used it much. The last Nintendo console I bought was a game cube. You can easily live without Nintendo. They’re definitely decent games. Just not for that price.
They do fill a “good for all ages” niche that not many other AAA games do nowadays. Which makes the exorbitant pricing especially strange.
You underestimate how many people literally cannot stop themselves from playing Mario. I’d hope it’s mostly children begging their parents, but I have a feeling there’s a decent amount of 30 year olds with disposable income and zero impulse control in there.
I’m going to try very hard not to be, but I’m definitely the type of person you’re describing. That Nintendo direct had me drooling at the new Mario kart and donkey Kong games, and nothing hits like a zelda. Super mario wonder was a delight.
I only hope I can emulate this system relatively quickly. I am not a man of strong willpower.
That’s why I’m just not looking at these new games. It would be interesting to know how they’re tackling an “open world” Mario Kart! But I already know it’s too expensive for what I’ll get out of it, so taking a look will only be bad for me in the long run.
Sounds like they’re doing a Forza Horizon kind of setup, where you drive around the open world to get from one structured race to another.
It’s kinda cool in that it keeps you in the world, but also annoying if you just wanna bang through races
Do you play many indie games? I feel like they’ve taken most of these formulas and really expanded on them, way more than Nintendo will do.
I do! Many of my favorites are indie games, I’d say more than not. But I guess there’s some things that you can’t do without a massive budget or many many years in development, because many nintendo core franchises just aren’t beat in quality in my opinion, at least for some entries.
Don’t feel bad for liking things. Your post kinda bums me out. Don’t let all this negative hype impact what will make you happy. If you can afford it. Do it. If you can’t then yeah don’t, but we as people are allowed to enjoy things.
Streamers.
Streamers and YouTubers are mostly who I blame for this. They are influencers who showcase the games and it makes their fans want to buy it.
I can’t count how many times I’ve read online that so many people refuse to buy some game, then I go on YouTube and see like 5 YouTubers playing it day one, because they (or maybe even a fan) bought it.
me! I’m that guy pre ordering the switch as soon as I can lol
The Switch was the generation where I really started to have adult money, and while a lot of the games I got were lower-priced indie titles, I did get pretty much all of the big 1st party titles.
There’s a reasonable chance I get a Switch 2, but I’m not gonna be buying a lot of games over $70, and the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off. I suspect I’ll be buying fewer games this generation, and I’m okay with that.
the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off
Which is almost never.
It’s uncommon, absolutely. But I bought Super Mario Odyssey around the third time I got an alert that it was on sale, for $50 or so. This took a couple years, so it’s reasonably rare, but if the future looks like the past, it will happen
The fact that you have to have alerts to be able to get the games at a discount is pretty bad, but you’re doing it the right way!
I introduced mine to undertale and other stuff like cuphead, old school sonic games and SNES emulators. We dont care about latest Mario’s, but he does have odyssey.
Its much better than that. There’s plenty of Mario content to emulate.
Imagine going back to exclusivity with gaming consoles. PCs, and by extension, Steam won the console wars, and Nintendo is just trying its damnest to hold on to the last gasp of gaming exclusivity.
Yeah, Switch 1 was a nice break from playing games on my PC.
Your friendly reminder that Half Life was $49 in 1998, which is roughly $100 today.
Your friendly reminder that there were less than 1/10th of the people buying video games back then than there are now.
Also, Half-Life didn’t have a BattlePass, Time Savers, and other microtransactions.
Neither does Mario.
Your friendly reminder that gaming back in 1998 was still not selling millions of copies as compared to now and revenue has for gaming has been rising significantly since.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/
Cool, now do the cost of everything else and compare then to now and you might have some idea of why $80 for a video game is a bitter pill to swallow.
Friendly reminder that games from 1998 were just games and didn’t have endless predatory mechanics designed to cripple the game in some way to extract money from you after you bought them too.
You can play Mario on old dumb phones using J2ME emulators.
I can’t imagine trying to play games designed for controllers on a touch screen.
J2ME are old dumb non-touchscreen phones. My last one was Sony Ericsson j108i. And just now reading the Wikipedia entry, it was actually the last non-smartphone phone by Sony Ericsson! Nice.
Damn, the nostalgia is real. And the design still looks much better than smartphones which look pretty much all the same. Back then, phones had personality.
The Sony Ericsson phones in particular had very advanced J2ME support that I didn’t see that much difference between that and my first smartphone (Nokia C5-03). Not that there weren’t differences, the smartphone was definitely more advanced, but it wasn’t that huge of a leap.
I bought a switch and those Zelda games during Covid. When I moved, the switch got boxed up. It’s still in the box today.
I’ll be skipping Switch #2 - $80 games reinforces the decision.
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Not that prices will be much better for long
Won’t they, though? Even disregarding the option of piracy, while new games will be $70 or $80 or whatever at launch, they go down eventually and Steam pricing has always been better than console.
But… it’s not the only place to play mario…
Yup he’s right. Nintendo can charge whatever they feel like, add dlcs and monthly sub payments and 90% of people will buy it all the same.
If Mario is 100x more expensive than it needs to be, and there are millions of games that are just as good for a dime, you don’t buy Mario.
Gamers, be it on console or PC, are dumb. Time has shown this over and over again. Horse armour, overpriced micro transactions, golden cage launchers, games as a service, the list goes on.
There will always be people who buy overpriced stuff or don’t think about what will be in ten years.
Yeah, just prepare for 100 dollar games across the board WITH all of the shitty monetization at this point, gamers are going to buy their circus, consequences be damned.
I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.
Not to mention that other publishers will be watching this closely. If Nintendo gets away with it they will make this the new normal.
‘If it’s the only place to play Mario, you buy it’
Can someone rephrase this sentence? I don’t understand it.
People will buy the Switch 2 and its games despite the high price because of the exclusive Nintendo games you can only play on that console.
Which is amusingly also what Xbox and PlayStation had before everything started coming to PC.
He’s basically saying “suck it up, buttercup”. They think people are going to have no choice but pay these prices, with all the crazy shit going on. Maybe the Switch 2 will be successful, but most of my adult video gamer friends have already said they are going to pass. Only the ones that still have small kids are considering it.
What part is unclear? You want to play Mario, you buy a Nintendo console.
If you can only play mario on the switch, even if it costs a lot of money, people will generally buy the switch and the game.
Implying that people really like mario and that people are generally expected to do whatever it takes to play it.
He means “there are a ton of children with parents who cannot enforce boundaries and there are a ton of grown people who will make poor financial decisions”. Nintendo will exploit both
Hopefully someone will exploit Nintendo with a paper clip again
And he’s right. Switch 2 and its $80 games will not only sell like hot cakes, it will set the standard for AAA publishers going forward. I fully expect to see $100 base games as standard before the end of the next generational cycle, and they’ll still have microtransactions and endless special editions.
And I’ll continue to not buy them and support indie developers instead.
Sure. Unless you have a gaming friend group that gets interested in some new multiplayer game. Then you either buy it so you can play with them, or you don’t play with them. If this continues for multiple games, you will slowly grow distant from your friend group.
Idgaf about online multiplayer, only local and singleplayer.
Most groups like this have anchor games everyone goes back to after the 3 hours playing the new game is done. You can still be friends with them.
That ought to be fine… it’s like saying your friends aren’t really your friends unless you play [x y or z]… In which case, I’m moving on to play what I enjoy.
If the only thing keeping them as friends is playing all the latest ass-expensive games with them, they’re not worth having as friends.
Me too. I’ve put more hours into Balatro and Tape To Tape than I care to admit…
Tape to tape? Oh that’s new to me… Thanks friend
If you enjoy hockey and roguelites, it’s the game for you.
Dammit. I really didn’t need another addicting game
Update: it’s a great game. I’m not even a huge hockey fan, but it sucked me right in.
Lmao rougelite hockey. Eventually there will be a rougelite for everything 😂
I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure about it at first and it was kind of an impulse buy, but I was hooked after my first couple of runs. Great game for the Steam Deck too.
Yup. Gamers, PC, console, mobile, all want their circus to escape reality, regardless of the cost short or long term.
I mean I keep hoping that gamers would have an epiphany and push back on these anti-consumer practices but I’ve seen nothing in the past twenty years, only desperate games defending being gouged.
The game market crashed before. It can do so again.
And I will bail to PC as my main way of playing games. I know I’m going to have to eventually, the way the industry is going.
I’m not schocked by a game costing around 80$ as that’s already what a new game costs in my country.
I remember buying Final Fantasy 8 almost 30 years ago for above 90$ as a teenager.
I also kind of remember that NES and Super NES games were really expensive.
I’m not saying that I want the price of games to increase though and I think it’s weird that Nintendo is doing this when their games clearly aren’t the most expensive ones to create.
I know I won’t be buying a Switch 2and I think people should vote with their wallets.
How do you know how much it costs Nintendo to make these games? Do you have financial reports or something?
Have you seen the average Nintendo game? Unless they’re buying all of their developers solid gold keyboards to work on, I’m not seeing where the price justification comes from.
To be honest no, but I know that Mario Kart is making Nintendo a lot of money even if the game is really good and not the cheapest one.
I can’t blame Nintendo for trying to make more money, but don’t blame people for trying to spend less.
Game pricing hasn’t changed much, sure. I paid $70 for n64 games in 1996. But volume sure has
FFVIII sold 6 million copies in its first year, a huge commercial success, and has sold 9.6 million lifetime Ever juggernaut games like Mario 64 - 12 million copies. FFVII - 12.6 million Pokemon red blue green combined - 30 million Madden 2007 - 7.7 million (interestingly EA does not release sales figures for modern madden games, probably because sports games seem to make far more money from micro transactions than sales. NBA 2k for example sells around 7m units a year but is one of the highest grossing franchises in gaming)
More recent games:
baldurs gate 3 sold 15 million copies Elden ring 20 million Pokémon sword and shield - 27 million Diablo 3 30 million The Witcher 3 50 million Skyrim 60 million Rdr2 70 million GTA 5 200 million
So when people cry “wahh, videogame prices need to rise because inflation” remember that they are stupid and overlook the very basic fact that 20-30 years ago gaming was a niche activity that got nowhere near the volume it gets today. Any single game selling 50 million copies in the 90s or early 2000s, let alone 200 fucking million, was an insane pipe dream
What you’re saying clearly makes sense and I hadn’t thought about the fact that the videogames market had grown so much.
Still I also think it’s important to take into account that 80$ in 1999 isn’t 80$ in 2025.
I’m clearly not rooting to get more expensive games, but I want everything to be taken into account.
Anyway, I ain’t gonna buy any Nintendo console when how little my kids have used the Switch compared with the Playstation.
nope. they might be counting dumptruckloads of cash, but $0.00 of it will have come from me
Give it 3 months after launch and there will be an emulator that won’t be able to play games, but already have something like a black boot screen.
It would be funny if the reason Nintendo went after the Switch emulators because Switch 2 is the same, and you get playable games in days.
That was the prevailing theory. Why else go after emulators for a dying system?
Because you’re Nintendo.
Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:
Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation
Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game
In every other way it would lose the comparison.
With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)
For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.
can play any game from consoles up to some ps3
up to a lot of Switch, you mean.
That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.
It’s been a couple years since I tried PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation, but when I did it on PC was the compatibility of the emulator rather than processing power that caused most game to not be playable. It ran Katamari Forever really well, so I’m hoping I can get it running on the Steam Deck, too!
Definitely worth a try!
You think so huh? ~pulls on frock coat~
Is that right? ~puts on tricorn hat~
I don’t think Ralph agrees. ~“You’re goddamn right I don’t! - Ralph the Parrot”~
Let’s say Switch 2 emulation doesn’t get good for a few years (which is totally possible, depending on how well Nintendo locked it up). He’s saying that if it’s the only way to play NEW Mario games, people will buy it at $80. He’s right, millions will, but there are some like me who are huge Mario fans who will refuse to support such naked greed. Enough to matter to them? Probably not.
But I hope Switch 2 emulation does get to a playable state sooner rather than later.
He’s 100% right. Gamers buy terrible overpriced content all the time. Basically all of my friends that play WoW bought a 90$ a mount because it has an auction house on it. That’s more than the actual game costs.
Gar???
Sounds like someone thinks there is only one choice, buy or don’t.
🏴☠️Harhar! 🏴☠️
