Now You’re Playing With Power…Tightwad Power!

Nintendo is a very old, Japanese company. One of those very old Japanese companies that firmly believes in having its own traditions, values, and beliefs and in upholding them above all else. Of course, arguments can be made that they have often held onto those traditions to the point of stubborn arrogance, and in doing so they have made decisions that led them from being the saviors and rulers of the video game world to the company that was a distant 2nd- and 3rd-place runner-up in the previous two console generations. As we all know, that is no longer the case with the Wii, which has put Nintendo back on top and once again made them the household name that they arguably haven’t been since the NES’s dominance two decades ago.

Besides the obvious main factors of a cheap price point (with included game) and the anyone-can-use-it Wii-mote, the other key to Nintendo’s return to glory is them finally striking the right balance between upholding their tradition and embracing the new. I’m not going to go into the things they did the same and the things they did differently, because that’s not what this article is about. Instead, I’m going to focus on one particular (and particularly annoying) long-held Nintendo tradition that has always been my least favorite thing about my most favorite company: Their strict adherence to releasing all of their in-house games at full price and waiting far longer than almost any other company to drop the prices.

I’m not going to go as far back as the 16-bit era, because games in general were far too expensive on both the SNES and the Genesis, primarily because of the cartridge format. Plus, big box electronic stores were still in their infancy, FuncoLand was hardly the institution that EB/Gamestop is today, and “finding games for cheap online” was a sentence that wouldn’t have even made sense to the people of 1993. So at the relatively few stores that actually sold games, they started expensive and they stayed expensive. It’s just the way it was. Then in the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era, things began to change. PlayStation games came on CDs, which were far cheaper to manufacture. In time, the price for the average brand-new PlayStation game was a mere $39.99. Compare that to the average N64 release at $20-$30 more. It made sense: an N64 cartridge was far more cost- and labor-intensive to make then just zapping games onto CDs and shooting them out the door by the dozens. It also made sense that when the two consoles began releasing their best sellers at a budget price, PlayStation game creators could afford to let games go at only 20 bucks a pop, while Nintendo couldn’t do better than $40. Still, sensical or not, you had games like Super Mario 64 which, classic and excellent as it may be, was still considered an “old” N64 game but was going for the same price as brand-new, top-tier PlayStation titles several years into that generation’s life span. I admit that I don’t know much about profits vs. manufacturing costs, and whether or not Nintendo could truly afford to have a budget line cheaper than that for their older titles without losing money. But for games like Mario 64 and Goldeneye which had easily already recooped all of their development and production costs and then some, so what if they would’ve barely made any additional profit on them had they been an additional 10 or 20 dollars less? Doesn’t it give off a better impression that you’d be willing to practically give a million seller away to the people who are only just now able to afford your system or the people who have to wait until a game is as cheap as possible before they can buy it? I’d be willing to bet that there was a decent amount of PlayStation Greatest Hits that could’ve kept selling at full price. It just makes it feel like a gift to the patient and/or less-wealthy gamers out there.

Let’s give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt and say that they simply could not afford to let a new N64 game go for a penny less than $39.99. What about Gamecube? Now we’re talking disc-based games that, while maybe Nintendo’s unique disc format that the Gamecube utilized cost a little more than widely-available CDs and DVDs, still have to be pretty cheap to manufacture. But again, we saw history repeating itself with the Gamecube: Games stayed full price for literally years, way beyond PlayStation 2 and Xbox games released in similar time frames that had already dropped to $20. And even now, the few stores that still have brand new Gamecube games laying around rarely have a Nintendo-made game cheaper than $20. I’ve seen Super Smash Bros. Melee, a Gamecube launch title, still selling for $20 as recently as several months ago. Seriously, Nintendo? Yeah, I get that you still want to sell Gamecube games to Wii owners since its backwards compatible, but come on. For $20 I can probably get 6 excellent PS2 or Xbox games if I shopped smart, but I’d be lucky to get 2 decent Gamecube games for that.

Perhaps the worst offenders are Nintendo’s portable systems. You cannot tell me a Game Boy Advance game costs that much to produce, either in development or manfacturing. Yet GBA games (primarily Nintendo-made ones) took way too long to drop in price as well. $30-$35 was way too much to spend on 90% of the GBA library even at its peak. Yet you still have to fork out $19.99 for a new copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (which I’ve seen going for that as recently as this past Christmas), which is a port of a SUPER NINTENDO game, not to mention one you can get on Wii’s VC now for only 8 bucks. The Nintendo DS is just as bad. Pretty much any game that came out in the DS’s first few months should be, at most, $20 by now. Yet you’d be lucky to find Metroid Prime Hunters or Mario Kart DS for that much. And don’t even get me started on Super Mario 64 DS. Again, this is a port of a game that’s practically ancient by video game standards, and I still see the damn thing going for a full $35. You can’t tell me that that many people are still buying it that Nintendo just can’t justify dropping it even 10 dollars in price. One of the only exceptions to this rule is the Brain Age/Big Brain Academy series for DS. Hey Nintendo, don’t you think that one of the biggest reasons for those games’ massive success was their $19.99 price point? And didn’t you make a ton of money off of those games because they sold more than enough to make up for them being so cheap? Just thought I’d point that out. Of course, I’m making this point to the company that then brought one of them to the Wii (Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree) and made it $50 (and it was practically the exact same game). Sigh… 

Which brings us to the Wii. Surprise surprise, same deal. While you can find other Wii third-party launch titles like Red Steel and Rayman Raving Rabbids for $15 or less, Nintendo’s ExciteTruck still fetches 50 bucks at most places that still carry it new. Maybe great games that sold really well – but not nearly as well as they deserved to in comparison to the number of people who actually have Wiis, like Metroid Prime 3 or Super Mario Galaxy - would get boosts when they dropped in price after some time had passed. I’ve heard Nintendo say Twighlight Princess sold under expectations. Maybe give that one a price slash as well. How many units of those games are still moving per month? And how many more would they move if they were cheaper. “Yes, I finally got my hands on a Wii. And look, a Zelda game for only $20! I might as well go ahead and grab that now, too.”

I just don’t get the logic in staunchly sticking to the “full price” philosphy for every game and still not having an offical budget line for either the Wii or the DS yet. Get with it, guys. You are finally embracing online play. You are finally designing hardware that asthetically looks more like hi-end electronics than children’s toys. Fine, so some of the things you didn’t change have just as much to do with your current runaway success. But you are still just too damn tight in the wallet. Put some more money into Wii production so everyone who wants one can finally have one (18 months later). And take a small financial hit in order to get your still-amazing games into the hands of as many people as possible, especially the ones that were released in fiscal years that you’ve already long-since filed away. If other console manufacturers can do it, and other publishers on your hardware can do it, you’re going to have a really hard time convincing anyone that you can’t do it, too.