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.
02:26Their thinking was, in order to be successful in console gaming,
02:29we have to reestablish this sort of sense of value, make them feel like what's in here,
02:34what we're offering them, is actually worth their time.
02:37In 1985, Nintendo marketed the Famicom console as an entertainment device,
02:42rather than a toy or video game system, an effort to remove itself from the stigma of the crash.
02:49It also capped each third-party publisher's output to five games a year,
02:54incentivizing 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.
03:18This 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 the NES
03:30without approval, and they had to use some interesting methods to try to get by the copyright protection.
03:36In Nintendo's quest for quality control,
03:38a key part of its strategy was developing its own games and IP in-house.
03:43In 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.
04:04Pokemon, 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.
04:32Here I've got a copy of Super Mario 64, signed by Charles Martinet, the original voice of Mario.
04:37If we ever had a fire, that would be the first thing I'm grabbing.
04:41Drew Kennedy, who goes by Nintendrew online, owns an extensive Nintendo collection,
04:47and was converted to a lifelong fan in the 90s.
04:50Thanks to quality games and those beloved characters.
04:55There it is.
04:56I'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 go
05:24over 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.
05:41This 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.
06:33Every Nintendo soul, from our point of view, is one person out there not buying Sega software.
06:39But while Sega marketed to older kids and teens and made some risky bets on console hardware,
06:55Nintendo stuck to its slow-but-steady strategy of family-friendly titles and commitment to quality.
07:02By 1995, Nintendo had regained its lead over Sega.
07:06They 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.
07:18And so then people go with what they know best. Are the games better?
07:21So other than Sonic, there's a few different IPs on the Sega platform and the ecosystem there.
07:26They'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.
07:43Especially from the marketing perspective, we were really showcasing the great work that
07:47the developers were doing creating 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 large company,
08:04but it's a very small company relatively in terms of other companies within gaming, within entertainment.
08:12Something that we heard about all the time was the concept of competing in the red ocean,
08:16which is what we had been doing previously with Sony and Microsoft, where everybody is kind of competing
08:22on the same points, versus the blue ocean, which is we don't really have anybody that we're competing with.
08:27We've created our own niche.
08:31Nintendo is very much colorful and playful. Xbox tends to focus more on shooters. They have a lot of racing games.
08:38PlayStation really leans into like more adult narratives and like deep stories.
08:45Now you have Astro Bot from the PlayStation. It's like, okay, so 15 years later, you got your own Mario,
08:51but Nintendo has already claimed it because they've gotten it right from the beginning.
08:57Nintendo's exclusive franchises like Zelda and Pokemon kept growing in popularity.
09:05But to access them, you needed to own a Nintendo console.
09:09Nintendo likes to keep its own titles on its own platforms, and it's one of the few companies that can do it.
09:14There'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.
09:28Take Mario Kart 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.
09:40Nintendo has always positioned itself as just like a premium experience.
09:43Ever since Nintendo re-established value in the industry, they haven't let it go.
09:47That's something that we would have a lot of conversations about was, let's be careful that we're
09:54not doing anything that's going to devalue our products, either literally in terms of dropping
10:00the price, 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, because it
10:13seemed to me at least that about 90% of the library that would come out for Xbox or PlayStation
10:18would usually also come out on PC.
10:23That lack of exclusivity can mean massive price cuts.
10:27Take God of War, Sony's once-exclusive top-selling game on the PlayStation 4.
10:32It retailed for the standard $60 in 2018, but has now been as low as $20 on Steam.
10:39You can pretty reliably expect that those games are going to go on sale not long after they come
10:44out, whereas when it comes to Nintendo, those games are reliably going to stay at that same
10:48price 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 that
11:30people 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
11:54at $450. But that's still cheaper than most competing gaming systems, which is another part
12:02of Nintendo's strategy. Throughout the console generations, they've generally been the cheapest
12:08option, and I think that that is right in line with their kind of family-friendly strategy. They've
12:13wanted to have as many people as possible get access to their product. A prime example of this success
12:19was the Wii, priced at $250 and bundled with Wii Sports in North America. That's half the price of the
12:26PlayStation 3 at launch. The Wii was so much fun, and it was something very different. It sounds too
12:33good to be true. Being able to play a game of tennis in your lunch hour, and you don't even have to take your
12:38suit off. It's very friendly, as opposed to like the dead serious Xboxes of the world and the
12:43PlayStation. It was like, this is a grown man kind of thing. I remember playing Wii Tennis with my
12:50mother-in-law, and she's beating me. Cheaper, more broadly appealing consoles means a wider audience to
12:57sell exclusive games to. Evidence suggests that most people buy Nintendo hardware to play Nintendo games.
13:05Between 2018 and 2023, about 80% of Nintendo's overall software revenue came from its first
13:14party games. Even 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. Switch and Play members
13:51live streamed their initial reaction to the Switch 2 console and game prices.
13:55This is going to be a bit of a bigger pill to swallow, but I'm seeing the price of how much
14:02Mario Kart costs. $70, right? Nope, $80. Damn. $80? While the stream was going on, like,
14:09it wasn't just myself, Mike, Peter, and Christian in the video, but also people were in the chat that
14:15were from Switch and Play having that reaction on stream. When we realized that, oh, it's actually going
14:20to be $80. It's like, wow, that's really steep. I'll take it, but man, that's going to be quite
14:28something for families to try to buy a system for a Switch 2. I thought it was going to be like $400.
14:33I expected maybe $500 if they were going to pack in a game, but the $80 Mario Kart price was definitely
14:41a shocker. Some fans are finding reprieve in the $500 bundle version of the Switch 2 with Mario Kart
14:49World. My only respite for this is that, like, if it's bundled in the package, it's like $30 less.
14:55It's $50, basically. So I'm taking that as like, oh, I'll just go digital and save myself $30. So
15:00it'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,
15:16which eventually requires a paid subscription. Looking back on the Wii in particular, I remember,
15:24I mean, Wii Sports was the killer app for the Wii. Like, everybody wanted to play Wii Sports,
15:28and that was a free pack-in with the Wii. So I think it was very easy for a lot of people to justify.
15:33It would be nice to see them do the same thing for the Switch 2.
15:37Even Reggie Fils-Aimé, the former Nintendo of America president, seemed to take a subtle dig at it,
15:42tweeting 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
16:10motivation to upgrade. Sony did the same thing with the PlayStation 3. You come out with a price
16:16point and then you realize you're wrong. Some analysts speculate that Nintendo raised prices
16:22in anticipation of tariffs. They say around the Switch 2, we think it's a premium experience that
16:29warrants this higher price point. Yes, and also there is a huge amount of tariff-based volatility
16:36in the market. When you build things that are manufactured in China and have to be shipped to
16:40the U.S., it's very expensive. And so they have to bake that into their models.
16:46We can't verify how big an impact tariffs had on the price of the new console or games.
16:51But fans were fearful that the Switch 2 could get more expensive when Nintendo delayed the pre-order
16:57date in the U.S. and Canada after President Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs in early April.
17:04But it didn't end up raising the price. And Nintendo's president denied that tariffs influenced pricing.
17:11Many balk at an $80 price tag for a single game. But adjusted for inflation, $80 isn't as pricey as it seems.
17:22Take a look at this catalog from 1997. Super Mario 64 cost $60. That's around $119 today.
17:32In 2020, some companies started selling games for $70, the first price adjustment in decades.
17:39That'd be around $86 today. Take a look at this chart. It shows the price of Nintendo's top-selling
17:47titles since the NES, adjusted for inflation. Games have actually gotten cheaper.
17:56Some say $80 games will be the new normal.
18:00One former PlayStation executive said Nintendo was pulling the Band-Aid right off for the industry.
18:06And Joost 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 6 has been in development for about 11 years. And it has a
18:28budget of a rumored $2 billion. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, cost a billion and a
18:35half. It took six years. And so we're already double all this. And it's not even out yet.
18:40During the same period that costs have exponentially increased, the price point of a game has barely
18:44moved at all. Something's got to give. They have to either sell more copies or they have to increase
18:49the price. Nintendo says prices will be variable, but other companies are already following suit.
18:57Just one month after Nintendo showed off the new Mario Kart, Microsoft announced that some
19:02upcoming first-party games would cost $80. Even if that change is overdue, consumer perception
19:09matters. The Switch 2 and its games feel expensive. In the US, consumer sentiment has declined every
19:18month of 2025. People worry about the economy and feel like their money buys them less than it used to.
19:26But despite the outrage, some say $80 is more than worth it.
19:30An average single-player game, 40 to 60 hours to finish? Where can you get 60 hours of entertainment
19:36for 80 bucks? Show me. What roller coaster goes on for 80 hours?
19:40A good rule of thumb that I and a lot of my friends tend to use is the kind of like $1 per hour rule.
19:46Nintendo games offer a ton of a ton of value and also just an unparalleled replayability. You can
19:54always come back and especially with the the specific kind of nostalgia I have for Nintendo's
19:59experiences. Like I will never stop going back and playing my favorite Nintendo 64 games or my
20:04favorite DS games. Of course that relies on Nintendo maintaining the quality it's known for.
20:10Games like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet with its glitches and performance issues left a bad taste for
20:16many fans. But Nintendo's cultural hold on fans is strong. Both with younger audiences it brings in
20:24through movies and theme parks and the older fans who have been with Nintendo for decades.
20:30I think it's certainly become more common and more acceptable for people like me to stick with
20:38their fandom into adulthood. And it's definitely less of a social death sentence to be a huge nerd in
20:482025. And even looking at the marketing for the original Nintendo Switch that's it's clear that
20:54that's not lost on Nintendo. Many fans share Drew's sentiment. The Switch 2 pre-orders sold out in a few
21:01hours. People will buy it anyways. My forecasts are 12 to 15 million units in the first year. They have
21:09such a huge install base. The loyalty is there. They have so many fans. The IP is so strong. They will sell
21:15like hotcakes. Kit and Krista however share a much more cautionary tale. It's going to sell very well
21:23but it's not going to reach the same heights as the original Nintendo Switch and part of that is the
21:28price. You know once all those people buy Mario Kart at $80 what about the the next rung of people
21:36outside of that core fan group? What about you know the more casual video game player? I think it's going
21:42to depend on the software the games that Nintendo will announce beyond what they have for the rest of 2025.
21:51If we want to sustain the success of the video games industry and have it continue to make these
21:58experiences that we like to enjoy and play and share with others they're going to have to adjust
22:04the economic model and that includes its price point. I think the concern from fans is that variable
22:10pricing means that the price can only go up but I think variable pricing where there's actually
22:17kind of a lower range of price points for games is a great opportunity for Nintendo as well.
22:24If any viewers are struggling to enter this space and want to play Nintendo games I would give the
22:29advice to like look backward and try to find some that have already stood the test of time and have
22:35solidified themselves as classics. I mean you could probably pick up a copy of Star Fox 64 for less
22:39than $10 in any major city. That's a fun weekend.