A former PlayStation bigwig comments on the price increases for the Switch 2 and its games, while reminding that the exclusives will undoubtedly make players crack.
“Wow, that’s a hefty price increase between the Switch 1 and the Switch 2, and wow, $80 for a game?”. Guest on the PlayerDriven podcast, Shawn Layden, former head of PlayStation Studios and currently an advisor at Tencent, shares his thoughts on the pricing policy adopted by Nintendo for its new console.
He uses the word “hefty” to describe the substantial price increase observed between the two generations of Switch, both for the console itself and for the games that come with it. “hefty price hike” can be translated as a steep, heavy, or sharp price increase… A word that fits the situation well, and we already explained to you a few days ago that for us, the Switch 2 is no longer really a family console.
Do the exclusives justify the price of the Switch 2?
But according to Shawn Layden, Nintendo can afford such a price increase with the Switch 2, without too much fear of losing its customers along the way, thanks to exclusives. “It’s the only place where you can play Mario, so you take out your wallet and buy it… Same for Donkey Kong and Zelda. This first-party exclusivity softens the price shock a little, so to speak, because we really want this content,” he believes.
While the exclusivity strategy is starting to lose momentum, with Xbox starting to release its games on all platforms and PlayStation launching PC versions of its titles a few months or years after their console launch, Nintendo is taking advantage of its strong licenses that are inaccessible elsewhere to attract players to its ecosystem. Shawn Layden discusses the FOMO effect (“fear of missing out”) that exclusives can still cause in consumers.
At Phonandroid, we were rather convinced by our first hands-on with Mario Kart World, while Donkey Kong Bananza gave us a good feeling. We'll soon know if these first two big Switch 2 exclusive games will boost sales of the console.
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