Hey Canada, ready to start paying $100 for your Nintendo games?

The regular version of Odyssey is now being listed at $99.99.

Hurray for impulse preorder I guess.

Nope

Looks like it's just a "placeholder" price for now.

I bought MK8 Deluxe as a gift for my brother - it was nearly 90 bucks after tax. I agree, this is getting totally ridiculous.

Stuff on Steam is like 80 bucks, which is more reasonable (even though we really don't make that much more money, if at all)

Seems like Americans are still paying the classic 60, and despite "only" being down 27 cents on the dollar we get gouged a bunch extra on top.

If I can get shipping and handling covered, it's actually cheaper to buy many physical games from down south. Um... what?

@iammattz: It says that, but something's up when every other game is $79.99, and it was previously listed at $79.99. Why change it?

I preordered it (Yeah I know) for $75 on amazon.ca a while back and with prime it comes down to $65. Weird that it does now show as $99.99 because they seemingly have upped the price. Maybe one time preordering has payed off.

If games go up in price AGAIN I just don't know how ill be able to afford keeping this up. thats almost double what Americans are paying.

This is very frustrating.

Seems like its only for Mario though. All the other first party Nintendo games like Splatoon 2 and ARMS are still listed at $79.99. Strange.

Doesn't Australia already pay over a hundred of their dollars for a new game? As an American, that sounds fucking insane. Are Steam sales at least decent?

When it moved up to 79.99 it started with Stars Wars Battlefront only and then more and more games moved up to the price in the next few months until they all were.

I want to be optimistic but we have seen this before.

It's almost like Mario works for the mafia, or somethin. If someone complains, he sends Toad to put a Yoshi head in your bed.

@justin258: All the PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam sales are exactly the same in Canada as they are in the USA. PC isn't as big a deal since we can just use something like Green Man Gaming to get new games for between 60 and 70.

Only reliable way to get a discount on new console games is through Amazon Prime, so we end up paying about 75.

Eh.... I remember certain SNES, Genesis, and N64 games being $110 back in the day. The price is terrible, and certainly prevents me from buying games at launch, but they still cost less than most things in my area.

What you lack is fair game pricing, make up in a government not actively on fire. :p

In all seriousness though, that's a bummer. Are you guys noticing price hikes on a bunch of new games or do you think it's just a Nintendo tax?

Right now it just seems to be the Mario pre-order

Australian minimum wage is also between $16 and $18 AUD, which cursory Gooling has also just told me is almost the exact same as the Canadian dollar.

Can someone smarter than me do math and tell me if that's a good thing or not?

this shit sucks. I am already reluctant enough to buy a nintendo console after those last two.

EB Games Australia still typically charge around $89 - $99 per game but if you're savvy you would shop at other retailers (for example JB Hi-Fi typically sells games at roughly $69 - 89). It's way better than back in the 360/PS3 days where games first launched as high as $110 but even they went down to around $89 by the end of that generation. As for Steam sales (I'm assuming you mean buying launch games on Steam and not actual Steam sales?) they're typically $69 - $89 depending on the publisher. It still sucks but PC versions are usually $10 cheaper than their console counterparts.

I was just wondering if Steam sales cut video game prices as legendarily as they do here in the States (though, recently either they haven't been as impressive or we've just gotten so used to Steam sales that they're a normal thing and never surprising anymore).

It still sucks but PC versions are usually $10 cheaper than their console counterparts.

This used to be a thing in the US as well - PC games were always ten dollars cheaper at launch. But then publishers started releasing them at the same price as console games.

How much does it cost to import games? All of the current consoles are region free, so in most cases you could buy the game from Amazon US or something and have it shipped to you, if all the math works out right and shipping costs aren't too high. Or you could have a US account on each of your consoles and buy your games digitally.

It's worth noting Steam still does not localise currency in Australia. Australians pay in USD so the currency conversion has to be taken into account. In addition to this, apparently Australians will be taxed 10% on Steam purchases starting this year?

Steam sales in the US and Canada are the same, but the prices are different due to exchange rates. So for US Steam, you have a section called "Under $5" whereas we have "Under $7" because that's how the conversion rate goes, but if a game is -60% on the US store, it's still -60% on the Canada store. For that reason, we can't import games from the US for any cheaper because the reason we're paying more is that 60 USD = 80 USD, which is our normal retail price. I've noticed that they've started putting duties on game imports (at least from the US) as well; I got hit for both Wind Waker HD (Gamestop pre-order came with a Ganon statuette but not at EB Games) and Final Fantasy XV collector's edition (fucking $50 on that one too).

All of my friends order through Amazon via my account because I have Prime due to being a student and that's the only way we can get a decent price (71.67 CAD after British Columbia taxes) for new releases without searching around at mom-and-pops. I totally get that the reason our prices went up is because the CAD went down but fuck man, 60 CAD to me hurts the same as 60 USD to the average American.

Depends on what the cost of living is like. In British Columbia (where Vancouver, a major city with a huge cost of living, is), our minimum wage is $10.85 (going up to 11.35 in September because of said cost of living going higher) and renting a room is just about the only way you could live on your own at that wage. $15-16 would be sufficient to live, but not with a lot of spare cash. I got really lucky to get a 2-bedroom basement suite with utilities included at $1000/month and I'm like 45 minutes away from the city proper.

From what I understand, Amazon US doesn't ship games to Australia. At least, I haven't figured out a way to do so. I've been able to order art books from Amazon but never games. I'm relatively lucky in that I have a Hong Kong PSN account and the digital prices there are on par with US prices, so I could get a launch game at around $60USD. For physical games though, like the Persona 5 Take Your Heart Edition, I had to pay almost double the US price. It was fucked.

For $100, that Mode 7 better be awesome.

This is the first I'm hearing of the Steam GST news and that is totally fucked. I already use Green Man Gaming for the majority of the new game purchases and unless they change the prices to be AUD rather than USD I will use it for 100% of my purchases. Steam can fuck right off if they think these are prices that need another 10% on top.

NZD is essentially the same as CAD right now (~7 cents difference), and Nintendo games have been $110-120 on release for as long as I can remember. It's why I almost never buy Nintendo games, since they also never go on sale.

Does Canada have sales tax baked into the price, or is it like the US where that is tacked on after the fact?

Tacked on after. It's quite annoying, and one of my coworkers who comes from Wales constantly brings it up.

In that case, those prices are bloody insane.

I think its just going to be mean I wont be getting games new after this year which is a kinda of a bummer. As @vasta_narada said as a consumer 60 dollars to me hurts the same as 60 dollars as an American. 80 dollars made getting games very cost prohibitive but 100 dollars ($115 after taxes here. we are the most taxed in the country I believe) is not something I can spend often.

The only saving grace is digital game sales are becoming more normalized even on consoles. Though with PC sales even better maybe this is the thing that makes me invest in a PC.

@kingbonesaw: I live in the states so I have nothing to complain about but they have already started charging sales tax on digital purchases. So yeah, it's probably only a matter of time before that comes your way.

Kinda strange, seeing as the dollar hasn't changed that much in the last couple of months. $60 USD = ~$80 CAD last time I checked. Are we sure this isn't just a placeholder price? And as much as I dislike pre-ordering games, the Amazon Prime discount is just too high to pass up. At $80 a year, once you've purchased 5+ full priced games at $80, you break even with the price of Prime.

@ichthy: I bought Breath of the Wild on March 15th and still got the amazon prime discount (12 days after release).

Ordered The Surge for £25. Tesco clubcard points all ends up, son.

Same thing on Steam. It's the only reason I even buy new games these days (if I really can't wait for a discount).

ehh..

As soon as games became 80 bucks the whole "buy new" thing was over for me, so 100 is an irrelevant jump, I've already been gated. That was about 1-2 years ago I think.

I assume new game sales in Canada are in the fucking gutter but us having the equivalent gaming population of, I dunno, New Mexico, probably means it's just a drop in the bucket. Or, a lack of a drop in the bucket I guess.

Wow, $80 is already way too much for most games. The only game in the last few years I'd pay $100 for is The Witcher 3 (and maybe Zelda), because that was a 100+ hours worth of good content. I've already significantly reduced the number of games I buy new since the price went up to $80, and increasing the price to $100 will change that to basically zero new games. Hopefully this is just a pricing error and it will be corrected shortly. It's not like the Canadian dollar has gotten significantly worse in the past few months.

Sucks but not unexpected. Hey at least Nintendo is known for lowering it's prices to a reasonable level eventually, right? Right guys? WHERE'S EVERYONE GOING?

I've been on a self renting system for some time now, (buy on amazon prime for the discount, play it, sell it on e-bay, lose some money but not a lot) so this doesn't bother me too much, the stuff that bothers me is when our dollar is AS good (or for a while when it was better then the US dollar) and these type of prices didn't even change for a second.

Give me price drops/sales/renting or give me death at this point

I was trying to find statistic on that, but my Googling isn't up to par I guess. I found a CBC article from 2009 saying "Canadians spent a record $2.09 billion on video-game consoles, games and accessories, and year-over year growth was 23 per cent, NPD said in figures released Friday." But, I mean, that was 8 years ago so not to helpful.
But if that number held up, that's pretty good right?

If this ends up being the norm then I will not be buying a Switch and I will be done with Nintendo unfortunately. On PS4 at least I am able to get a bunch of great games when they go on sale. I rarely buy games at launch since the jump to $79.99.

Weirdly enough, sales taxe isn't enforced on digital purchases (yet) so you end up saving like 12-15$ that way.

@pyrodactyl: PSN is the only digital store that doesn't charge tax.

Valve charges sales tax on Steam purchases in Canada? They didn't before.

Welcome to the 100usd gaming club!
Canada can now join most of the rest of the world in being annoyed
that everything gaming-related is priced higher than in the US.

I'm from Canada and I get no sales tax on Steam, I just did a quick test with an indie game and a new triple AAA dev game and no sales tax appeared.

Right now the USD is 37% higher in worth than the CAD. So that doesn't even account for the price difference, it could cost more in Canada and still make less for the publishers. Plus, keep in mind your slightly higher taxes give you the tremendous gift of not paying $600/mo for health insurance that doesn't even cover much! Look at the bright side, us in the US are completely funked with this health care situation... you'll be enjoying games into your 100s, and we'll all be dead at 70!

@zombievac: Yeah but it takes 2 years to get checked for something bad like possible cancers and stuff like that.

Free isn't always the best option.