Nintendo’s Switch 2, with its lovely $449 retail price, is coming out swinging with an $80 price tag on one of the company’s most popular series. Mario Kart, while almost certainly poised to sell extremely well, is gaining traction in the news cycle specifically because of this price hike.
The cost of a AAA game has been sixty dollars for roughly fifteen years, with the release of MW2 (2009) marking a strong point in history when developers began using that price tag as the de-facto buy-in for their titles.
Lately, some devs have been using $70 as their mark for standard prices, but Nintendo, who generally does not let their games go on sale, barely took part in that change before announcing Mario Kart World’s $80 tag.
And It’s Completely Reasonable
After Civilization 7’s release, which sold for $70 at base and $100 for the deluxe edition (which had content that arguably should have been included in the base game to begin with), the annual reminder that modern developers are generally pretty much fine with releasing unfinished games in what is essentially beta, just to have its consumer base pay for the right to play-test their game.
Nintendo, while absolutely far from perfect as a company, is not known for releasing games that are unfinished. Their products are family friendly, encourage couch-gaming with friends, and are actually finished by the time the consumer gets their hands on it.
$80 for a AAA game that can give multiple people hundreds of hours of genuine fun without the hassle of obscene patch notes or performance issues expected of an early access release, sans subscription model? Yeah, that’s pretty good. It’s still not going to be enough to get more people on the Switch 2 hype train (if it can be called that), but it’s reasonable.
(All of this assumes the game isn’t disappointing in the first place.)
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