Some 45 years in the past, Japanese recreation designer Shigeru Miyamoto sat down and created a potbellied Italian plumber who lives in Mushroom Kingdom to be the participant character in 1981’s Donkey Kong — now he is the rationale Nintendo is charging $80 for a number of the upcoming Change 2 video games. Or at the very least, that is one cause for the software program worth hike, in keeping with former Sony Interactive Leisure president Shawn Layden.
The subject of the Change 2 worth and the $80 Mario Kart World is so scorching proper now that I actually really feel like I’ve written this similar story earlier than, however properly, right here we go once more. Sure, the Change 2 is $450 within the US, though opinions differ on whether or not that worth will stick after president Trump’s tariffs, and sure, some video games are going to value $80, together with the primary heavyweight of the Change 2 launch lineup, Mario Kart World. A lot of folks have heaps of issues to say about all of this, together with Layden, who reckons of us will nonetheless line as much as shell out for everybody’s favourite shell stomper.
Pushing again in opposition to the present trade pattern away from console exclusivity, Layden argued throughout a latest episode of the PlayerDriven podcast (timestamp) that, at the very least for Nintendo, exclusives are main drivers of {hardware} gross sales.
“Proper right here you see, ‘wow, that is type of a hefty worth hike from Change 1 to Change 2 and, wow, 80 bucks for a recreation?’ But when it is the one place the place you may play Mario, you then get your pockets out and you purchase into it… and Donkey Kong and Zelda. That first-party exclusivity mitigates that sticker shock, if you’ll, of those worth hikes, since you need that content material so unhealthy.”
In the end, we can’t know if Layden might be confirmed appropriate till the months and years after the Change 2’s launch after we can have some long-term gross sales information to have a look at, however it’s doubtless true that Nintendo has a loyal base of diehards that’ll pay no matter they should with a view to play new Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda video games. What stays to be seen is simply how massive that base is, and whether or not the console can have the identical mass enchantment of its wildly profitable predecessor.
