The base model officially launched in 2017 for 299 euros nintendo switch still selling for the same price six years later, something Mario’s house has no intention of changing. Despite the decline in console sales, the Japanese company’s management reassured its shareholders that: will maintain its current pricing policy in the future. “The yen is still weak and purchasing costs are still high, so we will continue to monitor the situation carefully,” the company’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, told delegates.
The executive who runs Nintendo also acknowledged that the hardware industry has been rocked by component access issues in recent years. the situation is not completely balanced. Therefore, it may take some time before there is a normalization in the production chains that has a positive impact on the production costs of the Nintendo Switch. As for the possibility of a price hike, as Sony did with the PlayStation 5 last summer, President Nintendo doesn’t completely rule it out.
New prices of video games
At the same meeting, Furukawa was asked whether the selling price of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ (€70, the highest ever for a Switch game) represented a change in the software’s pricing policy. company. The manager reinforced the argument they’ve been repeating in recent months by insisting that such decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, depending on the individual characteristics of each project.
“It is true that development costs have increased due to increased depth of content. and the requirements of more technology to support online services, so the price of our games in the future is something we will continue to think deeply about,” explained the Nintendo president.
15 million more consoles this year
It’s worth remembering that the company’s board of directors acknowledged a decline in Switch sales in its latest financial report, but at the same time aims to sell at least 15 million units by the end of the fiscal year. In the same document, the company also acknowledges that no hardware or successors of its current console will be released before April 2024, and there seems little chance of witnessing any announcements before then. “We will provide information about hardware and software We will strive to reach a wide range of consumers at the right time for each product.”
Note that at the moment Nintendo’s plans for 2023 remain unclear. We participated in the launch of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’, Europe’s fastest selling game in Nintendo history, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide in its first three days. However, aside from ‘Pikmin 4’ scheduled for next July, the second half remains shrouded in mystery and with no new Pokémon or titles like Mario announced for the Christmas season in sight, there aren’t even release plans for anticipated deliveries like other Long- ‘Metroid Prime 4’ .