You know, reading through a bunch of the discussion in this thread, and seeing the gripes that Nintendo's games aren't being cut in price when it happens so commonly elsewhere, has me thinking back to a topic that was brought up around here a week or so ago that revived the discussion about excessive game monetization and the old "well games are so much more expensive to make now, so they have to add all the exploitative microtransaction stuff to recoup costs, should the standard cost of games be raised?" take.
I can't help but laugh to myself a little that somehow both of these can be highly-supported takes. On one hand, it's "anti-consumer" apparently for games to not cut their MSRP within a year or two of its release, and on the other hand games should obviously start off selling for $80 or more instead of 60 because publishers will choke to death on their own ambition otherwise. How grand will it be to live in a future where games start selling for $80 standard right out the door (even more than that for their six different collector's editions pre-orders), only for initial sales to tank because most consumers will catch on to the fact that if the game doesn't sell well, the publisher will panic and cut the price down within a couple of months. So what was gained by raising the price in the first place? Most of the large publishers are simultaneously reaching to pull more money out of consumers while diminishing the value of their own base product. Putting both of these takes together paints a pretty cynical future.
Meanwhile Nintendo games continue selling for $60 and will sell well at launch and for a long time after, because there's little to no incentive to wait and most of their first party offerings aren't likely to see games from other companies release in the immediate aftermath that reach the same niche. Nintendo hardware relying largely on Nintendo software is both a blessing and a curse for them in that sense, since they don't get the same level of third party support to prop up the console's library but that also gives their games less to compete with in the ecosystem, allowing them to retain their own value longer.
