Nintendo has been a video game giant since the early 1980s. For about 15 years, big-budget Nintendo games cost $60. In fact, that was the standard game price across the industry. Meanwhile, Nintendo's consoles are generally cheaper than most competing gaming systems, such as the Xbox and the PlayStation. Its consoles have never cost more than $300…until now.
At $450, the Switch 2 is Nintendo's priciest console. And Mario Kart World is priced at $80 — the most expensive base game Nintendo has ever released. Some fans are outraged by the price increase. But some industry analysts say that it's time for games to be more expensive, considering the rising costs of game development and inflation, among other factors.
So, why is Nintendo suddenly so expensive? And what does an $80 game mean for Nintendo and the entire video game industry?
At $450, the Switch 2 is Nintendo's priciest console. And Mario Kart World is priced at $80 — the most expensive base game Nintendo has ever released. Some fans are outraged by the price increase. But some industry analysts say that it's time for games to be more expensive, considering the rising costs of game development and inflation, among other factors.
So, why is Nintendo suddenly so expensive? And what does an $80 game mean for Nintendo and the entire video game industry?
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00:00When Nintendo announced the price of its new console and game, the message from fans was clear.
00:09The Switch 2 costs $450. That's Nintendo's most expensive console release.
00:17But the console price isn't the only thing spurring outrage.
00:22Nintendo also announced that Mario Kart World would cost $80.
00:26That's the most expensive base game Nintendo has ever released.
00:32For more than a decade, video game prices were pretty much all the same.
00:36$60. That's also how much the last Mario Kart game cost.
00:41But Nintendo is making a bet that if it raises prices, fans will pay.
00:47And some industry experts say this pricing adjustment is long overdue.
00:52Gaming hasn't updated its prices for a long time.
00:56In fact, they've only gone down in a sense.
00:58We're in business to make money, which is exactly what we're about.
01:02So why is an $80 game such a big deal?
01:05$70, right?
01:07Nope.
01:07$80.
01:08$80?!
01:09And why is Nintendo suddenly so expensive?
01:13In 2024, the industry brought in over $180 billion.
01:18That's over six times as much as the global film industry.
01:22But in the early 1980s, gaming was on the brink of collapse.
01:27After several years of just explosive growth, suddenly quality assurance goes out the window.
01:35Everybody has a Space Invaders.
01:37Everybody has a Pac-Man-style game.
01:39And as a result, consumers, they don't know what to buy.
01:42It's a very confusing moment.
01:43Famously, E.T. comes out and the game is trash.
01:48It's just a disaster.
01:50And all of a sudden, it's as if the floor gets, like the bottom falls out of the industry.
01:56People thought that video games were officially dead.
02:00Even the word games became a dirty word.
02:02It's a fad. It's a toy. It's a temporary infatuation like a hula hoop or a roller skate.
02:10Things were looking grim for the industry until Nintendo entered the scene and single-handedly
02:15revived video games.
02:17Nintendo enters the U.S. market and everybody thinks they're crazy.
02:21They're thinking was, in order to be successful in console gaming, we have to re-establish this
02:30sort of sense of value, make them feel like what's in here, what we're offering them, is actually worth
02:36their time.
02:37In 1985, Nintendo marketed the Famicom console as an entertainment device rather than a toy
02:43or video game system, an effort to remove itself from the stigma of the crash.
02:48It also capped each third-party publisher's output to five games a year,
02:55incentivizing developers to focus on quality over quantity.
03:00And to regain consumer trust, Nintendo created a monthly magazine, Nintendo Power.
03:06It was even accompanied by a hotline players could call for help with Nintendo games.
03:12Every game published for the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES,
03:16carried an official Nintendo seal of quality.
03:19This was Nintendo's way of showing that they have vetted and approved software for their platform.
03:25There were a couple of resourceful developers back in the 80s that would try to get games on
03:29the NES without approval, and they had to use some interesting methods to try to get by the copyright
03:33protection.
03:36In Nintendo's quest for quality control, a key part of its strategy was developing its own games and IP
03:42in-house. In 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros, and Mario remains its most recognizable character today.
03:54From there, its lineup only expanded.
03:58They've had success, of course, with Mario, which is the same or bigger than Mickey Mouse at this point.
04:03Pokemon, which they own as well, partially. Zelda as well.
04:09With quality games and repeatable beloved characters came a loyal, rabid fan-mates.
04:16There's over 2,000 people out there right now.
04:23This is the main entertainment center. I've tried to create kind of like what I've been calling
04:28little video game shadow boxes for each of the console generations from Nintendo. Here I've got
04:33a copy of Super Mario 64 signed by Charles Martinet, the original voice of Mario. If we ever had a fire,
04:38that would be the first thing I'm grabbing.
04:41Drew Kennedy, who goes by Nintendrew online, owns an extensive Nintendo collection and was converted to
04:48a lifelong fan in the 90s, thanks to quality games and those beloved characters.
04:53I'm in my 30s now. I started collecting when I was like 13, but I was a fan of Nintendo since long
05:02before then. My mom used to work as a babysitter on the side for one of her co-workers. Sometimes I
05:08would tag along. The dad of the family that she would babysit for, he had a Nintendo 64 set up in
05:13their living room with one game with Donkey Kong 64. At the time I was probably seven or eight years old,
05:19but I absolutely loved it. I would play through the first hour of Donkey Kong 64 every time I would
05:24go over there and reset the save file and play it again, and it was just absolutely core memory for me.
05:33Up here is another one of my favorite oddball systems, the Virtual Boy,
05:37and this is the complete North American library. This cartridge alone is worth about $750 today.
05:45But Nintendo wasn't the only one in the industry with a character-based strategy.
05:54In 1991, Sega made Sonic the Hedgehog the face of the Sega Genesis.
06:00Sega follows the same formula. Let's have a mascot sort of lead the way, but differentiate. Sega was
06:07already competitive in the sense that they have a little bit more intense hardware.
06:11The launch of the Genesis marked the start of the first console war, where Nintendo and Sega battled
06:28it out to control the video game market in the United States. Every Nintendo sold from our point of
06:35view is one person out there not buying Sega software. Sega's market share went from just 6% in 1989
06:44to as high as 65% by 1992. But while Sega marketed to older kids and teens and made some risky bets on
06:54console hardware, Nintendo stuck to its slow but steady strategy of family-friendly titles and commitment to
07:01quality. By 1995, Nintendo had regained its lead over Sega.
07:08They just couldn't hack it. There's only so much room in the market for it and Nintendo won out.
07:14And at some point, the difference between the different devices becomes marginal. And so then
07:18people go with what they know best. Are the games better? So other than Sonic, there's a few different
07:24IPs on the Sega platform and the ecosystem there. They're not quite as popular as the Nintendo ones.
07:29Nintendo's secret to beating Sega is still the company's edge over its competitors 30 years later.
07:36Everything was in service to making sure that game experience was top tier. Especially from the
07:44marketing perspective, we were really showcasing the great work that the developers were doing,
07:48creating these magical experiences through games.
07:51That's Krista Yang and Kit Ellis. They worked for Nintendo of America's public relations team for over a decade.
07:58The thing that's really interesting about working at Nintendo is it's a very
08:02large company, but it's a very small company, relatively, in terms of other companies within gaming,
08:09within entertainment. Something that we heard about all the time was the concept of competing in the
08:16red ocean, which is what we had been doing previously with Sony and Microsoft, where everybody is kind of
08:22competing on the same points, versus the blue ocean, which is we don't really have anybody that we're
08:27competing with. We've created our own niche. Nintendo is very much colorful and playful. Xbox tends to focus
08:35more on like shooters. They have a lot of racing games. PlayStation really leans into like more adult
08:41narratives and like deep stories. Now you have Astro Bot from the PlayStation. It's like,
08:48okay, so 15 years later you got your own Mario, but Nintendo has already claimed it because they've
08:53gotten it right from the beginning. Nintendo's exclusive franchises like Zelda and Pokémon kept growing
09:03in popularity. But to access them, you needed to own a Nintendo console.
09:08Nintendo likes to keep its own titles on its own platforms, and it's one of the few companies that
09:14can do it. There's no Nintendo games on Steam. There's no Nintendo games on Xbox. That's for a reason.
09:20This exclusivity has allowed Nintendo to keep game prices high and rarely put them on sale. Take Mario
09:28Kart 8 Deluxe, for example. It's eight years old and is still sold at full price on Nintendo's website.
09:36Even a pre-owned version costs $50. Nintendo has always positioned itself as just like a premium
09:42experience. Ever since Nintendo re-established value in the industry, they haven't let it go.
09:50That's something that we would have a lot of conversations about, was let's be careful that
09:54we're not doing anything that's going to devalue our products, either literally in terms of dropping the
10:00price or in more of an ethereal way, where it's going to make our consumers think less of them.
10:08When I was growing up, I always kind of was drawn towards Nintendo and PC gaming as well,
10:13because it seemed to me at least that about 90% of the library that would come out for Xbox or
10:18PlayStation would usually also come out on PC.
10:20That lack of exclusivity can mean massive price cuts. Take God of War, Sony's once-exclusive top
10:30selling game on the PlayStation 4. It retailed for the standard $60 in 2018, but has now been as low
10:37as $20 on Steam. You can pretty reliably expect that those games are going to go on sale not long
10:43after they come out. Whereas when it comes to Nintendo, those games are reliably going to stay
10:47at that same price point for years. Those are the ones where I will sit in line or put in a pre-order
10:52to try to get them on day one because I want to be able to experience it as soon as possible.
10:57So why does Nintendo seem to be the only one to maintain premium prices?
11:02Nintendo has managed to capture and establish a portfolio of things like Pokémon and Mario and
11:10Zelda that are of such high quality. These are at the top of the food chain in terms of experiences,
11:15and they know that, and so they very carefully curate them so that they don't have to negotiate on price.
11:22I think Apple is a good comparison in terms of a company. An iPhone is not so exorbitantly priced
11:29that people simply can't get it, but it is a little bit more than the other options that are out there.
11:35But there's a strong belief that the reason that it's priced that way, that the added benefit that
11:41you're getting versus the others is well known and very clear. While Mario Kart World is the most
11:47expensive base game Nintendo has ever released, the Switch 2 is also Nintendo's most expensive console at
11:55$450. But that's still cheaper than most competing gaming systems, which is another part of Nintendo's
12:03strategy. Throughout the console generations, they've generally been the cheapest option,
12:09and I think that that is right in line with their kind of family-friendly strategy. They've wanted to
12:13have as many people as possible get access to their product. A prime example of this success was the Wii,
12:20priced at $250 and bundled with Wii Sports in North America. That's half the price of the PlayStation 3
12:27at launch. The Wii was so much fun, and it was something very different. It sounds too good to be
12:33true. Being able to play a game of tennis in your lunch hour, and you don't even have to take your suit off.
12:39It's very friendly, as opposed to like the dead serious Xboxes of the world and the PlayStation,
12:44it was like, this is a grown man kind of thing. I remember playing Wii Tennis with my mother-in-law,
12:51and she's beating me. Cheaper, more broadly appealing consoles means a wider audience to sell exclusive
12:58games to. Evidence suggests that most people buy Nintendo hardware to play Nintendo games.
13:06Between 2018 and 2023, about 80% of Nintendo's overall software revenue came from its first-party games.
13:15Even Hiroshi Yamauchi, a former president of Nintendo, once said,
13:20Sony is a company where hardware leads and software follows. Nintendo is the opposite.
13:26But is Nintendo's fan base big and loyal enough to pay higher prices? We went to a Switch meetup to
13:34find out. I don't love the idea of $80 games. $60 games are already quite a lot. And I don't know if
13:42I will get as many $80 games, honestly, because that's just a lot of money in general, especially
13:46right now where I think a lot of people are struggling financially.
13:49Switch and Play members live streamed their initial reaction to the Switch 2 console and game prices.
13:56This is going to be a bit of a bigger pill to swallow, but I'm seeing the price of how much Mario
14:02card costs. $70, right? Nope. $80. Damn. $80? While the stream was going on, like, it wasn't
14:09just myself, Mike, Peter, and Christian in the video, but also people were in the chat that were from
14:16Switch and Play having that reaction on stream. When we realized that, oh, it's actually going to be,
14:20you know, $80, it's like, wow, like, that's really steep. I'll take it, but man, that's going to be
14:27quite something for families to try to buy a system for a Switch 2. I thought it was going to be like
14:32$400. I expected maybe $500 if they were going to pack in a game. But the $80 Mario Kart price was
14:41definitely a shocker. Some fans are finding reprieve in the $500 bundle version of the Switch 2
14:47with Mario Kart World. My only respite for this is that, like, if it's bundled in the package,
14:54it's like $30 less. It's $50 basically. So I'm taking that as like, oh, I'll just go digital and
14:58save myself $30. So it's a little iffy. But even that deal doesn't have fans entirely sold.
15:06There's been backlash online about the Switch 2 Welcome Tour, a mini game and tech demo collection
15:11that costs $10. The Switch 2 also has a button for the new Game Chat feature, which eventually
15:18requires a paid subscription. Looking back on the Wii in particular, I remember, I mean, Wii Sports was
15:25the killer app for the Wii. Like everybody wanted to play Wii Sports and that was a free pack-in with
15:29the Wii. So I think it was very easy for a lot of people to justify. It would be nice to see them do
15:35the same thing for the Switch 2. Even Reggie Fils-Aimé, the former Nintendo of America president,
15:41seemed to take a subtle dig at it, tweeting about how he fought for the Wii Sports to be a free pack-in.
15:48Releasing a new product at an all-time high price is always a risk. In 2011, Nintendo released the
15:553DS for $250 — $80 higher than the DSi that preceded it — only to drop the price by exactly $80
16:05five months later. Critics said that the high price and lack of launch games left little motivation to
16:11upgrade. Sony did the same thing with the PlayStation 3. You come out with a price point and then you
16:17realize you're wrong. Some analysts speculate that Nintendo raised prices in anticipation of tariffs.
16:24They say around the Switch 2, oh, we think it's a premium experience that warrants this higher price
16:30point. Yes, and also there is a huge amount of tariff-based volatility in the market. When you build
16:37things that are manufactured in China and have to be shipped to the U.S., it's very expensive. And so
16:44they have to bake that into their models. We can't verify how big an impact tariffs had on the price of
16:49the new console or games. But fans were fearful that the Switch 2 could get more expensive when Nintendo
16:56delayed the pre-order date in the U.S. and Canada after President Trump announced his Liberation Day
17:01tariffs in early April. But it didn't end up raising the price. And Nintendo's president denied that
17:08tariffs influenced pricing. Many balk at an $80 price tag for a single game. But adjusted for inflation,
17:18$80 isn't as pricey as it seems. Take a look at this catalog from 1997. Super Mario 64 cost $60.
17:28That's around $119 today. In 2020, some companies started selling games for $70, the first price
17:37adjustment in decades. That'd be around $86 today. Take a look at this chart. It shows the price of
17:46Nintendo's top-selling titles since the NES, adjusted for inflation. Games have actually gotten cheaper.
17:54Some say $80 games will be the new normal. One former PlayStation executive said Nintendo was
18:03pulling the Band-Aid right off for the industry. And Yost says it's long overdue.
18:09The cost of game development has gone up. If you compare, say, the cost of a franchise like Call of
18:14Duty. A decade ago, a brand new Call of Duty game would cost about $45 million to develop. Today,
18:21that's about $700 million. Grand Theft Auto VI has been in development for about 11 years,
18:27and it has a budget of a rumored $2 billion. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world,
18:34cost a billion and a half. It took six years. And so we're already double all this,
18:38and it's not even out yet. During the same period that costs have exponentially increased,
18:42the price point of a game has barely moved at all. Something's got to give. They have to either
18:47sell more copies or they have to increase the price. Nintendo says prices will be variable,
18:53but other companies are already following suit. Just one month after Nintendo showed off the new
18:59Mario Kart, Microsoft announced that some upcoming first-party games would cost $80.
19:04Even if that change is overdue, consumer perception matters. The Switch 2 and its games feel expensive.
19:14In the US, consumer sentiment has declined every month of 2025. People worry about the economy and
19:22feel like their money buys them less than it used to. But despite the outrage, some say $80 is more than
19:29worth it. An average single-player game, 40 to 60 hours to finish? Where can you get 60 hours of
19:36entertainment for $80? Show me. What rollercoaster goes on for 80 hours? A good rule of thumb that I
19:42and a lot of my friends tend to use is the kind of like $1 per hour rule. Nintendo games offer a ton of
19:49a ton of value and also just an unparalleled replayability. You can always come back and especially
19:56with the specific kind of nostalgia I have for Nintendo's experiences. I will never stop going
20:01back and playing my favorite Nintendo 64 games or my favorite DS games. Of course, that relies on
20:06Nintendo maintaining the quality it's known for. Games like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet with its glitches
20:13and performance issues left a bad taste for many fans. But Nintendo's cultural hold on fans is strong,
20:22both with younger audiences it brings in through movies and theme parks, and the older fans who
20:28have been with Nintendo for decades. I think it's certainly become more common and more acceptable
20:35for people like me to stick with their fandom into adulthood. And it's definitely less of a social
20:45death sentence to be a huge nerd in 2025. And even looking at the marketing for the original Nintendo
20:53Switch, it's clear that that's not lost on Nintendo. Many fans share Drew's sentiment. The Switch 2 pre-orders
21:00sold out in a few hours. People will buy it anyways. My forecasts are 12 to 15 million units in the first
21:08year. They have such a huge install base. The loyalty is there. They have so many fans. The IP is so
21:13strong. It will sell like hotcakes. Kit and Krista, however, share a much more cautionary tale. It's
21:21going to sell very well, but it's not going to reach the same heights as the original Nintendo Switch,
21:27and part of that is the price. You know, once all those people buy Mario Kart at $80, what about the
21:34next rung of people outside of that core fan group? What about, you know, the more casual video game
21:40player? I think it's going to depend on the software, the games that Nintendo will announce beyond what
21:47they have for the rest of 2025. If we want to sustain the success of the video games industry and have
21:56it continue to make these experiences that we like to enjoy and play and share with others,
22:02they're going to have to adjust the economic model and that includes its price point.
22:06I think the concern from fans is that variable pricing means that the price can only go up,
22:14but I think variable pricing, where there's actually kind of a lower range of price points
22:20for games, is a great opportunity for Nintendo as well. If any viewers are struggling to enter this
22:26space and want to play Nintendo games, I would give the advice to like look backward and try to find some
22:32things that have already stood the test of time and have solidified themselves as classics. I mean,
22:37you could probably pick up a copy of Star Fox 64 for less than $10 in any major city. That's a fun weekend.