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When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Back in the 80's, Atari had a monopoly of games and charged absurd amounts of money for titles that pretty much had no quality control. The cost of each cartridge would easily go over $100 in today's money and gamers began to pull back on purchasing anything. This eventually culminated in the infamous E.T. movie tie in that led to pallets of its unsold cartridges ending up in a landfill and crashing the industry.

Now that Nintendo's signaled to the rest of the industry it's okay to sell digital titles at $80 each, how soon do you see gamers collectively hold back on their purchases that will eventually collapse the AAA market? Will the current trade war play a role in the hardware side of things with the collapse? Will all major companies save Nintendo suffer the downturn?

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Are there any Nintendo titles that cost $80 for the digital release? Digital version of Bananza is $70. I think Nintendo is the only company that’s going to weather upcoming storm just fine since they sell toys and there’s always a demand for those.

ET moment already happened with Concord (scrapped entirely after spending absurd amounts of money) and Veilguard (about to be added to cereal boxes just to recoup some cost).

[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Yes. Currently announced / released games with $80 price tag for digital:

  • Mario Kart World
  • Tears of Kingdom - Switch 2 Edition
  • Super Mario Party Jamboree - Switch 2 Edition (I think this also has new content)
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Switch 2 Edition (also has new content)
[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Well, that sucks. At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price. I thought they’d be doing what they did with Banaza which makes sense - those new carts have a non-trivial cost so charging less for digital seemed fair. I was wondering how they got around retailers pushing back against digital being cheaper but I guess they didn’t.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price.

At least in Europe the physical version is more expensive. Mario Kart World for example:

  • Digital: 80 €
  • Physical: 90 €
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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