What a ridiculous comment. Just because someone dosen't wanna pay 80 to 90 dollars for a nintendo game dosen't mean they're jobless or a loser. Defending a billion dollar corporation and kneeling down before them for screwing people over is loser crap.
I was exaggerating, but we both know there's a lot of both in the mix with the complaints.
And again, trolls. People just spamming "drop the price" because it's trendy and funny. They probably don't even care about the prices.
Only an idiot would say that, have more self respect. And this is from someone whos actually positive about Switch 2. In some countries like mine, the price is up to a whooping 2x times at worst. Nobody likes to pay high prices for something that is definitivelly not a luxury.
But gaming is a luxury though, compared to some other hobbies. Like reading comics or manga is a generally cheaper hobby, same with reading books, or buying new albums. Even stuff like DnD roleplaying or competitive card games are potentially cheaper in the long run, if you avoid extremely rare cards.
What games have over those though is the amount of content you get out of your dollar. Even with price increases, you're generally getting more per dollar out of gaming than the other hobbies content-wise. And gaming's usually had more alternatives for cheaper access, like rental stores or arcades (if you didn't quarter-feed), shareware, demos etc.
However a lot of those avenues have either disappeared or transformed so much they're no longer what they used to be. And some people were mentioning subscription services (and extreme discount deals with software bundles on PC) have made some people devalue games, expecting to get high quality out of stuff costing pennies. I think that is definitely true and part of the backlash to the game prices from the Direct, but I also therefore think it's fair to say most of the outrage (again, most of it)
isn't coming from Nintendo fans, specifically those who only play on Nintendo systems.
So for that majority, why are they really upset? It's probably not because they care about Nintendo setting those prices, they're more concerned 3P publishers and other platform holders follow suit. But have they stopped to think that maybe part of the reason for these prices by Nintendo is because of pressure and suggestions from 3P publishers who want to charge higher prices? We saw the same thing happen with PS5, I don't see why that couldn't be a factor here as well.
Nintendo apologists are insufferable. I'm a huge ninty fan myself, have had every one of their consoles since the SNES, and the vast majority of those were on day 1. I did even get the NES years later, just not when it was still in stores.
I'm really not happy about the Switch 2. It's not even just the price, even though the game prices are outrageous imo. It's just that Nintendo seem to have lost all of their innovation, spark, joyfulness and fun. They've become just another lifeless, soulless corporate monster bereft of any new ideas. The gaming community and society in general is definitely worse-off as a result.
The new ideas will come from the games, or their next hardware if Switch 2 bombs (it won't).
Why were people expecting some wildly crazy different concept for Switch 2 after the first one's done so well? It was always going to be iterative. Do I think they could've innovated in some smaller areas of the hardware better? Yes. But they have done some iterative innovations here, even with some of the features like the Game Chat camera feeds (for the players, not the other player's feeds, which look really choppy), and the mouse functionality of the new JoyCons.
Also aren't you maybe being a bit overdramatic with this? "Lost joyfulness & fun"? The new DK game looks like a lot of both. Same with MK World. I'm pretty sure the next 3D Mario will have some cool innovative game feature or two, and we'll see that when it probably gets revealed late this year or early next year. Like there are some really hot takes for a new system that just got revealed a couple days ago, people need to have cooler heads and not get caught up in the drama.
I feel like I'm being gaslighted since yesterday with arguments about how gaming was always a luxury hobby or how we should consider inflation for billionarie companies with historically high records of profits.
It's always been a luxury in total costs compared to most other hobbies, that's 100% true. However in older gens there were widespread ways to get around like like arcades (if you were good enough at the game), normalized shareware, demos, and rentals from places like Blockbuster & Hollywood Video.
Nowadays arcades (the traditional type) are mostly gone, the only real rental service like the old-school is Game Fly, and shareware & demos aren't nearly as common. We do have subscription services, but those have probably contributed negatively to the perception that high-quality gaming should be super cheap. I mostly blame Microsoft for that with how they purposefully underpriced Game Pass for several years to try growing the install base, while losing lots of money in the process. But SIE get some of the blame too with how they've handled some aspects of PS+, and throwing games like HFW in there shortly after they initially released.
And a good chunk of the outrage at the prices from the Direct for example, is probably coming from gamers who have gotten used to the "insane value" of services like Game Pass, PS+, or those massive "500 games for $1" bundle deals on various PC gaming storefronts (many done for charities, but the point remains). They've gotten a very warped perspective of what normalized game prices are or
should be, and we're seeing that in some of this outrage.