We finally hear from Doug Bowser!

On the pricing:

“What you see right there is variable pricing,” Bowser told The Washington Post. “We’ll look at each game, really look at the development that’s gone into the game, the breadth and depth of the gameplay, if you will, the durability over time and the repeatability of gameplay experiences.

On Nintendo Switch:

Bowser said Nintendo remains committed to selling the first Switch console. Four years ago, in our first conversation, Bowser said the Switch is “redefining what a console cycle can look like.”

“Now I even wonder what is the definition of a console cycle,” Bowser said. “We’ll continue to keep Nintendo Switch as part of the family, giving consumers a number of different entry points that they can come into the gaming universe.”

(…)

“What I would say is that we’ll continue to observe consumers and how they engage and enter into the platform at various levels to try to really understand what the future may look like,” Bowser said. “Here’s the other point. We have an install base [for the Switch] of 150 million plus units. We’ll probably announce more on May 8 when we have our next earnings call. We want to keep those players engaged. Not all of them may be ready to jump to Switch 2.”

  • spitfire@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    And game prices haven’t been going up for a long time. Not that I want them to, but the fact of life is that the production cost for games are way higher now, while their prices are not. Everything else is getting more expensive. I’m not saying it’s not sustainable, but I understand that these companies want to make money, not just keep themselves afloat.

    • Senal@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      I see this argument a lot and it entirely glosses over the fact that the market is at least one order of magnitude larger, possibly two.

      The cost of a game is the development, marketing, maintenance to some degree and in some cases physical production of the medium.

      Past that it’s gravy.

      You charge 70 in the 1990’s times 100,000 sales vs charging 70 now to a million sales.

      It’s not like producing a car where you have a fixed unit cost, this is mostly copying already made data.

      Yes, the tertiary costs can go up and the development costs can go up but the addressable market has also gone up significantly.

      Nintendo specifically is absolutely not living release to release and is the worst possible example for this argument.

      Not only do they not really do sales but they also have DLC all the way up the wazoo and frequently rerelease old games at current market prices, with minor tweaks.

      They do not, however, lean all the way in to microtransactions, which is nice