Maybe in 20 years Nintendo will publish their games on Steam and we'll all laugh at 2015 while getting our bubbleberry sunshine vape on.

@quantris: Third-party releases are founded on support from the platform holder. Conformance guidelines, technical support, access to dev kits and SDK tools, and so on are the bread and butter of good outside devs. Nintendo has a terrible history for all of these. Since the Wii they've been releasing consoles with unusual features and innovations and not giving third-parties any assistance in harnessing those features. The games that make the most of the 3D effects on the 3DS are first-party. The games that controlled most easily on the Wii were first-party. The games that use the Wii U gamepad well are... well, kind of nonexistent. (The last time I heard someone describe an implementation of the Wii U gamepad as great was ZombiU. That was 2012.)

The GameBoy showed that technical power isn't everything. A sub-par system absolutely destroyed everything else by having a massive library. Nintendo's later consoles would have been and could be worthy successors if they'd give developers the toolshed they need to truly use the unique aspects of those consoles.

Nintendo games, unlike every other game released these days, are actually fun to play and are worth the money they charge for them.

e: also,

That's a very good point, and I agree that poor support for devs is a big factor. I recall reading some first-hand "horror stories" about that very thing. But I'd dispute that this is part of a strategy to intentionally drive third parties away from the system. I think it's more that Nintendo of Japan simply doesn't understand the importance of that kind of outreach, and aren't prioritizing those efforts enough (at worst that might be driven by some kind of misplaced pride, though). They're also probably at least a little out of touch with what game development is like for smaller third parties compared to the days when most of their execs were in the thick of it.

There are flashes of this changing (they are at least partnering with more studios lately; Bayonetta 2 was apparently an example where Nintendo helped a lot beyond just financing even, and hopefully isn't the only example). I doubt the story will change all that much for the Wii U though---IMO they really needed to succeed before the PS4/Xbox One came out.

It's hard to believe that games from Nintendo that came out like 2 years, Fire Emblem Awakening for exemple, are still sold at full retail price. Their stubbornness when it comes to that stuff is kind of weird.

I mean, for the first few months I can understand, but after 2 years, anybody that was willing to pay full price for a game, probably already did.

Eh, what can you say. Nintendo is gonna do what Nintendo does.

Edit: You know what? They're *exactly* like Disney when it comes to that stuff. I've been wanting to get The Incredibles on blu-ray, but it's still $39,99. Crazy.

@quantris: I wasn't suggesting that they should print a bazillion copies, but Amiibos are reportedly very popular, even before they made some of them rare and yet they decide to put some of them out of print, if they are literally just doing it for buzz then fuck them. With Pikmen is just seems that they aren't restocking shelves, which means it's OOP, whether or not it's discontinued entirely I have no idea, but the fact that it is going for over 60$ when a couple months back it was 30-40$ new is a pretty clear indication that they have stopped and yeah great if it's not popular, but at least put out enough copies to keep retailers stocked so it's not instantly a rare game that costs you an arm and a leg to get. This is exactly what happened with the Metroid Prime trilogy as well, it comes out, they stop stocking it and it becomes this extremely expensive collector's item.

@johnsonvillebratwurst: That's a lot of subjectivity you're passing off as matter of fact there. Also comparing exclusives, real grown up thing to do there. Compare good third party titles and see how things shape out for Nintendo. But sure Nintendo first party is great if you like long bouts of iteration occasionally split up by slight innovation of the exact same properties over the course of 20-30 years.

Eh I guess everyone's just gotten used to it by now?

Occasionally games do significantly drop in price (Metroid Other M is like £5 new on amazon uk) but yeah the majority stay around release price or rise, maybe its a Disney DVD type thing where they don't want the perceived value of their games to drop so they limit production? Idk

For the most part I don't care enough about Nintendo games to be too bothered, I do enjoy most of their games but I'm not too fussed about missing out on a lot of them so if the price is too high I just skip them. Sometimes you can find them reasonably priced second-hand or in sales but not too often, for me personally very few nintendo games are 'worth' the £40 release price, let alone higher. If they dropped to like £30 or less then I'd have bought more of them, but hey-ho

The gamecube adapter being oop is friggin ridiculous though, Smash hasn't even been out very long :/

As someone who Loves that movie, Fuck That Shit. 39.99???

@quantris: Yeah, I hope Bayonetta 2's release signals a turnaround for Nintendo of America. It was unfair of me to cast NoA's issues with support of third parties as intentional. Nintendo has a history of making some crippling decisions based in reasonable but faulty assumptions: the N64's use of cartridges, the GameCube's move away from HD as the Xbox and PS2 moved toward it, things like that. But it's probably a bit of market ignorance not too dissimilar from Microsoft's own in Asia, and ignoring for the moment Sony's and Microsoft's Augmented Reality Spectacles (glory rays), Nintendo's really the only one doing anything interesting with hardware.

I'm not freaking out about their prices because they make nothing that I want to play. They'll keep recycling the same series and targeting the same audience because doing that has made them trillionaires. But I'm tired of it.

I think it's just Nintendo controls the production and quantity of their games. This can also be seen by the way they ship their consoles to retailers as well. If i'm not mistaken, isn't the reason Amazon doesn't carrier Nintendo consoles because Nintendo wont "over" ship them the quantities they want? or something along those lines?

I can say though without question, because Nintendo doesn't drop their first party game prices it kind of makes you feel good when you buy one and then 4 years later it's still holding it's price. Versus buying something like let's say...Bioshock: Infinite and then 10 months later seeing it for $30. I also think from a nostalgia and even gameplay standpoint..Nintendo games hold up better than most other companies.

That's what you do when you have the exclusives people actually care about and a console that is a harder sell. I'm assuming this is a deliberate move on their part to recoup some of their losses. Idk business management though, I could be full of shit.

Pretty much. John's graphic there fails to take into account that non-exclusive games still exist and are still good. The problem with the Wii U isn't that the exclusive first-party stuff isn't awesome, it's that you have to wait SO FUCKING LONG between them with nothing else in the meantime. Microsoft and Sony can take all the time they want with their titles and no one notices, because people with those systems can at least play other stuff in the meantime. Once you're done with Bayo 2, your Wii U collects dust until next holiday unless you have a huge crew to play Smash with, and that's why the Wii U is seen as having no games.

I agree with what some have already said people just stopped caring at some point

I love Nintendo but those prices are pretty bad. Really keeps me from getting a lot of games. Some games are pretty awesome but for 40 bucks you can get a whole lot of Humblebundles, steamsales and other generally very cheap ass games that are probably just as good or at least entertaining.

@yukoasho: And of course if you don't have a group of friends who: A. Want to play smash and B. Are available fairly often to play smash, then a lot of the games on the system start to fall out of favor because of Nintendo's huge shift in focus to couch coop games.

@taliciadragonsong: This is the problem I'm having myself, I went ahead and bought Zelda Wind Waker HD again because I would like to play it, but for games like 3D World and Pikmin 3 that are not really things I am dying to play, but rather I would like to play them, I kind of can't justify 50-60$ each when I can spend 50$ and get like Farcry 4 and Call of Duty AW both on PS4 or something like that.

I would play it.

Nintendo is making people care about a Villager Amiibo. I don't think they would have sold as much as if they hadn't made it artificially rare. Valve does similar things with hats.

@nictel: The whole reason they gave for discontinuing them was that they were less popular models. I'm sure it did boost sales, but that's such a skeezy thing to do, discontinue some models to make people think any of them can become expensive, so they buy all of them? And people are sitting around moaning about Evolve while Nintendo is pulling the biggest bait and switch in gaming.

I wonder if Skylanders did the same thing, or if the simple fact that Skylanders were actually GOOD, made them sell better from the get go, whereas Nintendo has released Amiibos that have next to zero functional application so they boost sales by pulling bullshit like this.

I'm surprised the used market is as crazy as it is when it comes to certain games on the Wii U, especially with the prevelance and availability of digital downloads.

Pikmin 3 used is selling for upwards of $45, and nintendo gave that game away for free at one point with the purchase of another game. Sure, there are people who are dedicated to physical copies, but really? $45 used at the cheapest for a 2 year old game that can still be bought on the eShop? The supply is limitless and the demand is artificially inflated because they keep this cocky, arrogant demeanor, and it's what's pushed a lot of people away.

I never bought a wii, i do have a Wii U, and I'm still somewhat regretting that purchase. MK8 is fun, and that HD Remake of Wind Waker was alright, and Bayonetta was great, but that's about it.

And they don't give their third parties any support. Which, to me, is insane.

“We will aim for certain amiibo to always be available. These will be for our most popular characters like Mario and Link. Due to shelf space constraints, other figures likely will not return to the market once they have sold through their initial shipment,” read the full statement.

A Nintendo representative told WIRED that the company was not adding any further details about which Amiibo figures would be always available, and which would be phased out.

Wired

Here you have it, they purposely withheld the information of which Amiibo will be limited so you basically need to buy all of them. What is even worse is that nothing is stopping them from going "Surprise! Here are the Villager and Trainer Amiibo's again! Cause hey we never said they were limited!"

I know bugger-all about economics but aren't digital releases of games supposed to stop the physical prices going crazy?

Mario Galaxy has been $120NZ here since it launched. They just straight up never lower their prices.

Nintendo, for awhile now, has kept a strict control on their game prices. It wasn't until the last year or so of the Wii's life cycle when some of it's bigger, Nintendo developed, games dropped significantly in price.

I think this has to do with inventory control rather than price gouging. Go to a physical store location and Nintendo games are in stock, but not as many as other large releases for other consoles. Any major title has stacks still sitting on the shelves and if you look at COD as a "big" name example you'll see those prices rarely drop until one or two titles have been released in the series.

Really it's how Nintendo makes a few extra dollars especially in an era where 3rd party development is all but gone for their systems. I personally don't mind paying near full price for good or great games even if they're a few years old. I do mind being priced out of purchasing titles for a console I've already invested in. And I think it forces a lot of Nintendo fans to buy used instead of new, hurting Nintendo's bottom line.