Pass at 40 dollars each.  Maybe $30 for Mario Kart for me and the Remakes $20 maybe.  I have 3D Land.

Yeah, same here.  $40 for games you can pick up right now for $25-$35 Used is pretty steep, considering that they have already been out quite a while.

And before you bring up New Little King's Story, Ceric, that's a brand-new version of the game on Vita.    :P: : ;)

I fixed that for you.  You should have went with the argument that is more recently released and had the early adopter tax :P

I was all excited for this when it was announced in Japan, but the full price tag makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit.

This is why the all-digital era is not as close as some people might have you believe. Until you can buy a digital copy of a game from multiple online retailers, this will be a problem, as the publisher will always want to charge high to gain as much as possible and they will be much slower to cut the price. If the only downloadable copy of New Super Mario Bros. 2 available is £39.99, I'd get a boxed copy, any day of the week.

I would be outraged if I weren't certain that I'll end up buying 3D Land and 3D Kart again digitally at that price. And I'll be damn lucky if those are the only ones I re-buy. I have a real problem.

Nintendo needs to learn from Steam.

Also until they get there account stuff settled who would buy this version at more then what you can get it retail.

I'm all for getting rid of the media because of my personal habits but, I won't do it unless I'm not getting ripped off.

Yes you do.

All 4 of those games are still $39.99 MSRP at retail, so why would anyone expect Nintendo to sell them for less online than for the retail copies? This is the same price you will pay in stores (minus when the store takes a loss and puts it on sale).

The won't take a lost on being on sale at the current ones.  Roughly speaking I would expect they get game for about $10 cheaper in this case considering the prices.

Retailers would pay about $44 for a game they sold for $49.99, so they would make about $6 on that game. Not sure how much they make on 3DS games, but I would suspect it is less than $10. And when they put the game on sale, it comes out of their pockets (not the publishers).

I would think that when Nintendo lowers the MSRP on the retail versions, the digital versions will get a price cut too.

Which is History is any indication will be almost never.

The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one.

...

I'm going to pass this time, but if Starfox was cheaper...

A lot of people seem to overlook the fact that retailers sell the download codes too. In Japan they're sold on cards (and often priced higher than the physical copy). In America, you just tell the retailer you want it digitally, and they'll print your code out on the receipt and I think (though I could be wrong) they'll sell it for the same advertised price as the physical copy. Most people seem to be under the impression that it's only at GameStop, but I know it's also available at Target (if you ask) and it's apparently available at a lot more places that just don't advertise. So, if you see it for sale somewhere, ask if they sell it digitally and you might still be able to get it digitally for the discounted price.

Huh! Good to know Bman, I'm going to keep my eye peeled now for deals on Mario Kart 7 since I completely missed out on the physical copy...

I actually preferred it when Nintendo didn't really do online stuff other then Virtual Console, when they still seemed quaintly behind the times. It was less embarrassing and it stopped me getting my hopes up.
These latest eshop announcements are like watching your uncle turn up to a night club dressed in what he thinks the kids are into these days and hitting the dance floor to throw some shapes. It's to painful to remain sympathetic.


Anybody who pays £40 for Starfox or Pilot Wings just to have it always on the 3DS memory stick is taking fandom to a very dark and dishonorable place indeed. I love Star Fox, but even I waited for it to get reduced at retail (although not by Nintendo) before I picked it up. And I've had more entertainment from FTP iOS games then Pilot Wings Resort (literally). I want NOE go the whole hog and sell Steel Diver for £50, I reckon they'd make more profit out of 1 idiot buying it at that price then the number of people who'd download it for £20 or similar.


Also, knocking £1 off of Pullblox is (like the previous European eshop sale) not much of a purchase incentive. I know it means that you get your game for one hundred pence less than normal, but I am not even slightly tempted to put £10 credit on the eshop just to save one pound. I guess if you haven't already got Pullblox AND you have credit in your account it gives you a whole pound towards something else - hardly exciting is it? 
The whole eshop system is.... as has been said many times before...  dreadful compared to itunes, steam, PSN and XBLA.


I'll stick with physical releases then. Ah Nintendo, great games - blinkered approach to online. It gets truer and truer.


Imagine a Nintendo version of PS+, eh? Actually don't, it hurts.

Retail games are full price on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network too. You would not need to buy £10 credit to get the game, you can choose to pay the exact amount of the game.

They also normally come part and parcel with the Retail version.

I really want to see someone test this more thoroughly, but unfortunately, we'll have to wait for one of the stores that does this to have a sale on one of the games available digitally.

So do Nintendo games now, this is just them releasing past releases too.

And on the ones that released at the same time I'm not really saying much.

$9.99 or BUST!!!

LOL, with all 4 games being retail $39.99? That is about as likely as a porn star coming to my house and letting em bang her.

Once again Nintendo fail to appreciate the benefits of downloadable versions of their retail game. I don't agree with it, but I can at least understand why in those instances in which Nintendo are releasing their games simulataneously at retail and on the eShop, they would price them at full RRP (although ideally the price would eventually drop).

To price them at RRP months, and in some cases more than a year, after they were released at retail seems crazy to me. You might argue that Nintendo games have long tails, that their most popular games continue to sell throughout the life span of a system, and that Nintendo can therefore justify the price point. A cursory glance at Amazon uk, however, shows me that Mario 3D Kart can be obtained pre-owned for half price, Star Fox 64 3D for less than half price, Ocarina of Time 3D for just over half price etc.

My point is that Nintendo isn't giving me much incentive to buy the digital versions of their games. I purchased a physical copy of NSMB 2 because I bought it brand new from Amazon for £10 cheaper than I could get it from the eShop. I would have been interested to pick up Star Fox 64 from eShop had it been priced by a sane person. At that price point, however? Forget it.

You'd think Nintendo would be really trying to push these digital copies. With digital versions of their games Nintendo get a larger cut than they would by selling at retail, they save money on packaging and distribution, and it also means that the game cannot be resold. The whole thing, however, only works if Nintendo sell these games at a reduced price point. Instead, however, I'm incentivised to go purchase a pre-owned copy of the games for which Nintendo gets nothing.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep 3D Land and Mario Kart at full retail, since they're major titles and will most likely remain that way in physical form for the foreseeable future. Ocarina and Star Fox were probably too high to begin with, and are much easier to find for significantly less than MSRP, so they should probably have been lowered.

I wonder how this will affect the secondhand market. Will the prices drop because people are replacing their physical copies with digital? Or will prices rise because with people buying digitally, there will be less physical copies to go around?

I'd argue most of these games (the non-Mario ones) are probably about done shipping by now, so the number of new copies that entered the wild probably wouldn't have increased by much anyways.