Why Nintendo games never see a price cut explained: ‘This isn’t Ubisoft’ Adam Starkey Published April 9, 2025 11:17am Updated April 9, 2025 11:17am Mario Kart World – don’t expect to see a price cut (Nintendo) Former Nintendo employees have revealed the company’s approach to pricing their games, amid the furore around the cost of Switch 2 titles. Last week’s Nintendo Switch 2 blowout may have delivered big game reveals and other surprises, but the conversation around the console since has been dominated by the price of its games. While the console is priced fairly reasonably at £395.99, the £74.99 physical price for Mario Kart World has become a bone of contention. The conversation around the issue has been amplified by US President Donald Trump’s recent wave of tariffs, which caused Nintendo to delay pre-orders in the US and Canada, as it assesses the possibility of a price increase for the hardware. The outrage around Mario Kart World’s price partially stems from how Nintendo rarely reduces the price of its games after launch. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, former employees at Nintendo have provided insight into the company’s rationale on the topic. Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, who previously worked at Nintendo as PR managers for over 10 years, discussed Nintendo’s approach to pricing games on the Kit & Krysta podcast, where they described the company as the polar opposite to other publishers like Ubisoft. ‘We did see, in the last stretch of our tenure at Nintendo, them get really obsessed and fixated on the value of the Nintendo product,’ Ellis said. ‘We would sometimes get approached, like ‘Can we do a giveaway of this product? Can we get five copies and we’ll do a giveaway to our community’. And if we’d ever take those [requests] to Japan for example, for them to consider it, we would often get a long lecture – especially in the last couple of years that we were there, like: ‘Nintendo products have immense value, we must always respect that immense value’. He added: ‘This is why these things don’t go on sale. The value is the value and we [Nintendo] are seriously into that concept of ‘respect the value of what this thing is that we have made, because it is very special.’ Ellis then joked, ‘This isn’t Ubisoft’, as Yang replied: ‘It’s not like the Ubisoft situation where I always tell myself, ‘If I wait a month, will this get cheaper?’ As a Nintendo customer, fan, I feel like all of us are conditioned to [be like], ‘If I want to buy this, I might as well buy this now, because it’s not going to go on sale’.’ ‘It’s a Nintendo tax,’ Ellis added. ‘You could always say, them looking at it [like], ‘what we made was $60. A lot of those other games that are $60 are junk. They don’t have the Nintendo level of quality or polish or attention, so we do need to distinguish how premium this thing is through the pricing, and you will come to understand that’.’ Prior to the Switch generation, Nintendo used to discount its best-selling games after a few years through the Player’s Choice or Nintendo Selects label. It’s unclear why this stopped after the Wii U and 3DS consoles, but this renewed focus on ‘Nintendo value’ might have something to do with it. Even before that though Nintendo has been worried about the general value of video games becoming devalued, with former president Satoru Iwata warning that the rise of mobile games was in danger of making it seems as if no title was worth more than a few pounds. And that was before the advent of live service games. ‘If you lower the price over time, the manufacturer is conditioning the customer to wait for a better deal,’ said Iwata in the book As Iwata by Hobonichi. ‘Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m against lowering prices entirely, but ‘I’ve always wanted to avoid a situation where the first people to step up and support us feel punished for paying top dollar.’ The Ubisoft comparison is apt because the company seems to have fallen into exactly the trap that Iwata describes, as most gamers now expect their games to be heavily discounted after only a few months. This came to a head with Star Wars Outlaws, which was released only a few months before Black Friday – when it did indeed see substantial discounts. More Trending The game’s relative failure partially contributed to the company’s current financial turmoil, although Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which launched last month, has performed much better. To hammer the point home, Star Wars Outlaws, which launched in August last year, is currently 50% off on the PlayStation Store seven months later. By comparison, most Nintendo Switch first party games are still the same price they were eight years ago, which has done nothing to hurt their sales given Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, for example, is one of the best-selling video games of all time, with close to 70 million copies sold. If you’re looking to pick up Mario Kart World at a cheaper price, your best bet is the £429.99 Switch 2 bundle with a digital copy of the game. Pre-orders are up now at select retailers, with the console set to launch on June 5, 2025. The Switch 2 launches in June (Nintendo) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. 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