I will admit: I’m in this picture.
Game developers have to eat, too, so a (!) price hike at some point was expected, the price for AAA games was set to 60$ before smart phones existed. They only stayed at 60 so long because gaming got much more popular in that time, driving sales. IF (!) this increase would allow developers to pay their employees more and eliminated the crunch culture, I’d have no problem with it.
But we know this is just corporate greed. Pay extra to own your game physically, pay extra to play your old games, join our subscription program. Oh, you’re in Europe and your wages kept up with inflation? Forget the 33%, you can afford a 50% price increase instead.
With the Japanese-only model being the singular exception, you’d think the direct was lead by 3 new faces just so Nintendo could put the blame on them when the thing doesn’t sell well due to the price.
Oh, and Skull and Bones was dog shit, of course everyone hated it’s ludicrous price point.
The increased price is not the result of tariffs, neither for the games nor console. That’s pretty much confirmed by them costing the same amount (converted + sales tax) in Europe. The console is (was, before tariffs) fairly priced imo, it is comparable to the steam deck + dock.
Is 80$ Mario Kart price gouging? Eh. The edit maniac in the comments here is right that video games have become cheap, maybe even too cheap, and that a price increase at some point was inevitable. 60$ was set as the AAA price before the smartphone existed, and was not always profitable as we’ve seen with the recent lay-offs.
My own 2 cents: I’m glad some company broke that unspoken rule (we ignore skull and bones for obvious reasons), so big releases have more options in pricing, too long have we accepted 60$ games with 20$ DLC, I’m glad if this means devs can just charge 80$ for a full game. Oh, and it’s good for indie games too. People may actually buy the shorter games with worse graphics they wanted so badly a few months ago.