Nintendo Switch Expansion Pack Price?

I probably won't buy it(as I have an n64 and a lot of those games, and this might actually get me to invest in one of those ways to play them on current TVs).

But, I also don't think this is "going too far". If anything the gaming community is kind of at fault for this. Game Pass has blow up. FFXIV is one of, if not the biggest MMO right now(subscription based). Battle Passes and microtransactions are selling like hot cakes.

Clearly the community is largely cool with paying extra money for subscriptions/money on top of their original purchase over just buying things outright. I would probably get it if I didn't already have a system, and to be honest I still might depending on how much it will cost and how much of a hassle it'll be to get it running. I'll pay $50 to dedicate some time and play through OOT and Majora's Mask again.

Nah. I have ways to play old Nintendo games, and the option to play them handheld isn't compelling enough to justify this.

It’s funny, because if you signed up for some kind of Book of the Month club that was $50 a year, the books are all worth about the same, whether they were written 2 years ago or 2 hundred years ago.

But we tend to think of games as rapidly depreciating in value as the original hardware becomes obsolete. Which is kinda messed up, long-term. But yeah, doubling the price of the service where the value added is primarily some 20-30 year-old ROMs for Genesis/N64 games seems like a little much. If it’s going to cost that much they should literally give everyone who signs up a free copy of that trashy Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection.

The standard family plan is $34.99, so this is an additional $40/year. I haven't compared the lists of games, but I have to assume there is significant overlap between the Sega Genesis Classics package (which I already own) and the Switch Online offering, so I don't see much incremental value there. That leaves N64, which doesn't do a lot for me, and the Animal Crossing DLC, which can also be purchased stand-alone. I'll buy the Animal Crossing DLC outright if I decide that I want it, but I can't see myself subscribing to the new Switch Online tier.

Nintendo gonna Nintendo.

Why don't I get an option without the DLC? I don't own Animal Crossing and don't plan to. Why should I pay for shit I literally can't use?

Add on the likes of the PC-Engine and Neo-Geo and maybe it's worth the new price. But not as it is. Not even fuckin' close.

The price doesn't seem that bad its basically double the price with the inclusion of N64 + Genesis games which for me are much better titles, the Animal Crossing DLC can be bought separately as well its not locked behind a sub.

Put Smash 64 in the Expansion Pack, then put Online in Smash 64. You cowards.

That is quite literally the only thing that would even remotely approach a selling point for me. Especially because this is a cost added to an already existing service, anything less than free just seems like a raw deal here.

I won't buy it but I don't think it's too expensive as long as it remains optional on top of the regular online. If you're the type of gamer who wants to play that one game of your childhood for 10 minutes to get your nostalgia fix, then sure that is a high price to pay. But if you actually play many of those games then that is a hell of a lot of content for what is not a big price.

edit: Come to think of it, I might buy it. At least for the first year.

I get PS+ when it is on sale for cheaper than that and it gets you 3 modern games each month. There is heavy overlap between the genesis classic collection and these Genesis games but classic collection has many more than this, I picked that up for $12, I bet we don’t see that price again. I won’t get it but I’m sure Nintendo has done their research and knows there are people who will.

How long until they announce the Gameboy Expansion Pack in order to bump this thing up another $10?

EDIT: Also, DLC seems like a pretty weird thing to potentially lose access to if you let your subscription lapse. I've seen games that won't even start if you're trying to load a save that contains DLC that you no longer have installed. Does anyone trust Nintendo to handle that properly?

$30 a year would have been preferred. $40 would have been acceptable. But $50 a year for a service that I'd have to force myself to use since the Switch isn't my main platform is a tough sell.

I was initially fine with the price because I would have bought that DLC regardless, and I'm on a family plan with 4 other people who all would have bought the DLC so the price is easier to swallow.

But now realizing we'll probably be done playing Animal Crossing within a year, and then we're going to still be expected to pay that premium price the following year just to basically rent N64/Genesis games? I understand why people are upset.

@doctorfaust: I honestly have already assumed this is part of it. Have they not come right out and mentioned Online Support? If it's similar to how it works with SNES stuff, smash should be able to handle online.

And really, my excitement for this list drops dramatically if it doesn't include online multiplayer for some of the games.

EDIT: oh wow I must have just imagined that Smash was on the "coming by the end of the year" list they showed. Or assumed it was too much of a no brainer not to be included. Because now I can't find anything about it.

I clicked the thread because I thought, based on the title, this was gonna be a hardware expansion for the Switch like they did for the N64.

I find it interesting that on Youtube, the video has a massive down vote. Usually, Nintendo fans go along with anything Nintendo does no matter how selfish and remain loyal. I guess as the saying goes: You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all of the time.

I don't know if I would stray to say they "went too far", but the choice is an odd one. They needed to emphasize what else might be coming to that package in the future. Will more DLC be added? Better free games? GB/GBA games?

Without additional info, they present a package they believe will sell as-is. And I bet it will do decent just because nostalgia is one hell of a drug.

I think it's too much for what's being offered. Maybe if they give more free DLC for more games in the future it would be better? I dunno. What I do know is that it seems like the Steam Deck is going to replace my Switch as the handheld gaming machine that I use everywhere more and more each day.

Conceptually I don't think this is 'going too far' at all in the sense that it feels relatively in step with where the rest of the industry is moving, but it does feel like they've priced it a little too high in this instance.

It's not something Nintendo does with the goal of personally aggrieving their customers.

But it IS a stupid pricing decision, and that's plenty.

The price was more than I expected, but I don't have ready access to N64 or Mega Drive titles so the extra $25 or whatever isn't gonna break the bank for me. Call me a chump.

I'm not sure whether I'll get it or not. Will need to see more details on how exactly they're prorating the current membership to see if it's actually worth it for me to do that vs. get the DLC separately. I was already planning on just letting my current online run out when it runs out (IIRC I got an extra year from some bonus deal somewhere so there's a bunch left on it).

I think overall this package isn't really for me....I already have several of those N64 games on Wii VC and don't play them so....

But I can imagine some people going for it. Even if that's a minority of people it doesn't exactly bother me.

I've basically realized that everything Nintendo does on a business side doesn't come anywhere near my expectations of reasonable and therefore i am willing to miss out on their handful of amazing games. Same goes for this pricing. There will always be people that are okay with it and think it's worthwhile, but that's not me. But hey, this is a digital product that they have full control over at all times. They'll check how demand changes as they add content and use discounts and see what the optimal price is.

Given the huge love for Nintendo, their image as a top-tier premium brand, and all the nostalgic feelings that come with it, that pricepoint will probably always be too high for me. I'm not an Apple user neither.

Will be interesting to see if adding DLC to that service is going to be a ongoing concern from here on out. If you have 6 games worth of DLC tied to a subscription, it becomes quite a hurdle to stop giving Nintendo money. You'll lose access to considerable amounts of gameplay. Your savegames might no longer work.

I'm speechless about this but N64 is still a great console though.

I'll be honest it's hard to even consider since just getting a Switch and paying Nintendo prices for games is such an expensive endeavour by itself, i still don't have one, the £20 they knocked off recently was nowhere near enough, and i especially would not be interested in some kind of subscription service for something which, as others have said, can be found cheaper and better elsewhere.

With AC that probably works fine. Any exclusive items you get through the DLC can very likely be traded with folks who don't have the DLC. So taking away the DLC shouldn't change anything on your island, except that you lose the "going to work" option at the airport (or wherever it was).

I have the family plan because we play AC online enough. But I'm still sour on the whole because of the shit-show with cloud saves. We have three switches in the house, not being able to move my Splatoon cloud save and having to call Nintendo just to restore the AC cloud backup on a different switch (with warnings about the switch itself possibly being blocked from online play because this flow is only supposed to be used for stolen switches), the whole service is terrible and barely worth the money as is.

So I'm definitely not going to give them more money for some old games I'm only going to boot up once, they should have just added those to the current plan. I'll get the AC DLC seperately.

Preying on nostalgia is Nintendo’s superpower and they’re very good at it. Even with a lot of people upset this will still work in the short term.

I kinda wonder what kind of legs it has as any sort of ongoing service though.

That price cut only happened in Europe, to boot.

huh. i was naive and thought it would be a one-time charge since they called it an 'expansion pack.' the allusion to hardware threw me.

but if this is a doubling of the sub price for n64 and genesis games (which i already own many of)- yeah, not worth it to me.

im sure many people will pony up, though.

if it was a extra 5-10 bucks i might have Thought about it but no .. that price is ridiculous at this point imo. sure it comes with that dlc but how many of those will happen to offset that in the first place and thats IF your interested in that. at this point i'd rather just buy the games like how eshop VC stuff was on wii .. which .. idk about you but every time i bought something there i played it once n that was it , i don't need a sub for that

$30 would have been the better price point in my opinion. I already have most of the games I want in another format (Zelda/star Fox on 3ds and the genesis collection on my switch). With the track record they have for games added to the snes, I doubt there will be any good stuff being released. I don’t want to pay $50 bucks for crap like War Gods or Carmageddon.

With that price there should be either more games in sub (why not dump GB, GBC, GBA games too) or some kind of system like ps+ with monthly "free" games tied to sub that you can add to your library. The fact that you don't even get to keep the AC DLC is just plain shitty and outrageously stupid. That fact that my unhacked Series X can play way more old Nintendo games with retroarc than my unhacked switch is just ridiculous.

I don’t even care about the classic games. Im getting this just for the AC DLC. We’re a 3 switch household and it would cost $75 for all of us to get the dlc, or I can spend $45 to upgrade our family membership. Plus, my uncle that is a janitor at Nintendo told me that they were adding future first party dlc/expansions to the membership moving forward ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unless I’m misreading something, in Australia the increase in subscription price is actually less than the price of buying the Animal Crossing DLC separately. If you were going to get that, it’s a total no-brainer here.

Nintendo has really enjoyed charging people half a dozen times for Super Mario Bros and Link to the Past over the last ~15 years. But expectations around digital purchases have changed, and they can't make everyone start over from scratch each time. Subscriptions are the only way to continue extracting money for the same-old same-old games.

Predition: when they add GameCube games, it will be in yet another even more expensive tier.

Have they alluded to how many other games in the future will have their DLC access rolled into this NSO Expansion Pack, or is it just this Animal Crossing DLC at the moment?

Skimming the list of Nintendo published games with DLC passes, they seem to release a few a year:

Going forward, if this expansion pack pricing gives you all paid DLC passes/season passes for Nintendo games, that's kinda a good deal instead of paying like $30 for each of them individually. I guess, if you're really out there buying multiple Nintendo-published games a year maybe this $50 a year thing is for you.

Even then, some years (2018/2020/2021) are really light on DLC, so some years your value is just bad (including the launch year of this service where it seems that Animal Crossing is the only eligible DLC pass). And it still sucks that 5 years from now when you're no longer paying for Nintendo Switch Online but you want to play an old game, you'll only own the base game if all your DLC is locked to the subscription. At least Gamepass or PS Plus is more like you're renting the entire game and it's entirely ephemeral.

The communication on this is still really bad. If anything, they should've pitched it as the N64 and Genesis are literally just an added part of the existing cheap tier of NSO, and the expensive tier of NSO Expansion Pack should've been pitched as "subscribe to this and you get all DLC in Nintendo-published games" or something.

If you haven't played these N64 games, it's well worth it. Especially when B-K and Majora come down the pipe later. These are some of the best games ever made. Compare it to the SNES Classic, which costed $80. Granted, that gives you access to those games *forever*, which I realize is important to a lot of people, and yes I vastly prefer the Virtual Console where you can choose individual titles and keep them. But how many played the SNES classic more than 1 year after they got it? This many good games for $50 for a year is well worth it, assuming you are in the mood to play these games and you don't have another convenient way to play them. That said, I'm not in that category at the moment, so I won't be picking this up. I may in the future, though, if I get the urge.

Tying AC content to it is BS, though. That should be free or fairly cheap DLC.

Its kinda dumb and overpriced. A service thats not for me as I have no interest in revisiting those games. There arent too many old games that hold up today.

That being said - Gamepass on my Series S completely eliminated my need to keep my 360. Now whenever I want to play old halo I pay 15 bucks and can play halo to my hearts content. How many times am I going to do that in my life? Two, three? Seems a fair trade for the convenience. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to pay it here and there to relive some nostalgia, even if the value proposition isnt as good as we'd all want it to be..

So what are the other legal ways to play N64 games then? And don't say "Own an N64" cause you know how dopey that is

The price doesn't seem too excessive, but I hardly use my Switch anymore so I've canceled even the regular online subscription.

I fully expected this expansion to just be double the price of the base version. The fact they are both double plus $10 seems excessive. Especially since it seems the online features of the N64 won't have matchmaking lobbies. I got really excited at the idea of playing Mario Kart 64, Mario Party, or Star Fox 64 online with randos. I'll probably wait until I have a few months left on my base subscription, pay the discounted upgrade to add these, play as much as I want, then downgrade when I renew.

As far as I can tell, buy them on WiiU. I can't remember if that is $15 or $20 a pop though.

Too much for me. I would like to poke back at the N64 catalog but not these games, and not for that much. Maybe in a few years after Nintendo slowly doubles the library by inches at a time.

Gamecube games will be sold $30-60 at a time in various collections and HD remasters. No chance we'll get a big wave of them.

I took the dive and got it. I wanted to know if I can play online Mario Kart 64 and Mario Tennis with randos or if I can only play online with friends?

That's a massive "nope" for me, even if I did own the console that nobody bought I wouldn't want to keep it plugged in my TV set just for a couple of games. Buy 2 games and you've already paid the same that it would cost to rent the entire catalogue for a year, and no online gameplay, no portability.

Way that I see it is that there are maybe 5 games in there that I want to play for N64 and a couple for the Genesis. I pay 30 bucks and I have a year to play them and then I'm done, that's not a bad price at all for me because I have no intention to keep that sub running for 10+ years just to have access to Mario 64. And if one year from now Nintendo adds Gamecube or something else to make the offering better then it's another conversation again.

Adding the Genesis games is really pointless. Anyone who was interested in those games already bought the Genesis collection for like $10 on sale, and I can't see them adding anything particularly notable outside what is on that. For me, there are maybe four of the N64 games I would want to play (Mario 64, Zelda, Mario Kart, Mario Tennis). They could add Majora later, but the value just isn't there for me, and I wonder how many people it really is there for. Obviously, a better deal for AC players, but for those just getting the 64 and Genesis games, I think it is too much.

Just FYI you can nab the Genesis Classics collection for 12 bucks(CAD) on PS4. I imagine its for sale elsewhere too. Then you can own them forever(for cheaper) and not pay for that terribly valued service.

Having a MiSTer the NES, SNES and Genesis doesn't have my interest. I honestly need to finish and play Ocarina of Time. I was almost done with it at launch and my kid erased my game leaving me bitter. But I'm not forking out that much for one game.