It was the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal today. And while there's a lot to like about the system — 1080p and up to 120fps handheld, 4K docked, HDR, nifty online socialisation functions, upgrades to certain Switch games that include both a performance boost and new stuff for the games — one thing is giving me a lot of pause that I wasn't feeling before the announcement.
And that one thing is the price of games. As someone who collects physical video games, I naturally will want to continue doing that for any new console hardware I pick up. But the new Mario Kart is seventy-five fucking pounds for a physical version, and the new Donkey Kong game is sixty-six quid.
Donkey Kong is just on the borderline of what I'll consider paying if the game is legitimately good (and it's a real borderline case here as I don't really like Donkey Kong as a character), but more than £70 for a game that will almost certainly also have paid DLC is well over that line for me. I'm sure Mario Kart World, as the new game is called, will be very good, and I'm quite curious to play it — but £75 to have a copy on my shelf (and not much less than that for a digital-only version) feels… excessive. And I'm someone who voluntarily pays £35 to limited-print companies for £10 indie games just so I can have them on my shelf.
This feels like a mistake for Nintendo. It feels like it might put all the goodwill they built up with the Switch at serious risk of unravelling. I'm sure they will justify it by saying the new cartridges are higher capacity, the tech is more advanced or whatever, but it still feels like… a lot.
Couple that with the fact that while the launch lineup looked neat, there wasn't a singular game that made me go "yes, give it to me, I need this right now". We had a bunch of very welcome ports of stuff like Hitman: World of Assassination, Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (though no mention of Rebirth, interestingly) and numerous others, a Bravely Default remaster that I've been hoping we'd see for quite some time, the aforementioned new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong games, and a few other bits and pieces that were perfectly nice enough, but not really "system sellers" for me.
Not yet, anyway. I have no doubt I'll probably end up with a Switch 2 eventually. But today's announcement makes me feel like I probably don't need one at launch. Probably. Probably.
There's a few days until preorders open. I will have to mull it over quite seriously. Quite seriously indeed. In the meantime, though, it's not as if I'm short of regular-ass Switch games to play, including a selection of pretty chunky RPGs I still haven't gotten to.
So we'll wait and see, I guess. It was a good presentation, and there's a lot to like about Switch 2. But I feel like a lot of people who were all set to preorder day one are now having very serious thoughts about the situation, just like I am. I feel like this should have been an easy win for Nintendo, but as it stands, they could potentially have a problem here.
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Hey Pete,
Something is strange with those prices!
MK World is priced at 80 USD. That should convert to around 60 quid.
Here in NZ, the game is listed at 130 NZD which converts to 75 USD. I was really surprised to see that. Normally we get a sort of 5-10% "exchange rate" markup here.
But 75 quid sounds really OTT.
Maybe there's a chance they'll correct or adjust that.
The prices are bonkers at the moment, at least in part because of Cheetoman's tariffs. But yeah, £75 is what it says for a physical copy of Mario Kart on the official Nintendo store. The digital version is a little cheaper, and if you get the bundle, you effectively get the digital version for £30, which I guess is what they're counting on. The prices on there are usually pretty much what you pay anywhere else as Nintendo first-party stuff doesn't tend to see a lot of discounts anywhere.
I hope they do take a look at this prior to launch because I know a lot of people have suddenly hit the brakes after having seen these prices!