This past spring the highly anticipated Nintendo Switch 2 was announced and released. It’s a superior console to the original in every way, but it has one glaring flaw: the price difference of $150.
This price hike isn’t just a Nintendo problem, it’s a problem with the video game industry as a whole.
A question that has been on my mind regarding the video game industry is whether all these pricing increases are morally right. A large margin of the people who play video games are children, and due to everything going on in the world, most families can’t afford to play video games anymore.
The maturity of PlayStation and Xbox is marketed towards an older demographic, but just like Nintendo these games get into the hands of the wrong people. Because of this I find the business side of selling games kind of shady and it’s something I look down upon.
This has been a recent trend I have been watching from a distance. I remember when I was a kid and I would go to GameStop to get the new Whimsical game that was around $40, which I think is a very reasonable price. But now if I were to go to a GameStop, I’m being charged upward of $80 just for Mario Kart. This increase has driven me away from buying new games as a whole.
Sure, I bought the Spider-Man 2 deluxe edition when it was released for the PS5 for $90, but in my defense, I was excited and intentionally saved up the money. This game was 50+ hours of game content, but if I compared it to Mario Kart World, a game that’s only 10 hours tops, the high price just doesn’t make sense.
This isn’t the end of Nintendo’s pricing problems. Out of all the major game developers, their strategy of downloadable content (DLC) is the most greedy of all. DLC either comes through a free game patch, or in Nintendo’s case, paid content. When this model first started it was honest, but as the years went on, content that could have just been in the base game is now something you have to pay for.
Games are priced so high and DLC exists because of time and quality. If a game was in development for 10 years like GTA 6, then sure, the high price is necessary. But if the game is developed for merely two or three years like Pokémon, it isn’t really worth $70.
The quality and time put into these high budget games, or known AAA games, is truly insane and this model of long development is how things have worked in the video game industry for the past couple years.
The thing I find weird is that people are still buying home consoles knowing the ridiculous price. After a few years most games get ported to PC so truly in this day and age what is the point of a home console? This brings me to the point of the price of consoles themselves. When I bought my PS5 I paid around $450 for the best experience you can get from PlayStation at the time.
Now if I want that experience, I would have to shell out $800 for the PS5 Pro. At that point, I would just buy a new computer or maybe a really bad used car. Sure, you could blame these prices on a variety of different things, but in reality, this is just a slow increase within the video game industry.
Ever since 2020, they’ve been moving towards this more expensive model of selling games and consoles at a higher asking price. The upsetting thing is that they won’t decrease the prices because loyal fans will buy these games and consoles, even when the generation to generation improvement is so little.
All this has made me ask the question of if I should really continue to invest in this expensive market. At the end of the day, I most likely will, but maybe I won’t buy the DLC every time or I’ll wait to upgrade. But I think as long as you spend your money wisely, we can survive the next level.
