The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo’s first $AU90 game, but it doesn’t sound like it will have a whole lot of company anytime soon. Rather than being a watershed moment for premium Switch games moving forward, the publisher says the $US70 ($97) price point will be reserved for specific titles.
“We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis,” a spokesperson for the company told Game Informer in a statement. When asked if this was part of a new trend for Switch games, Nintendo simply responded, “No.”
Pikmin 4 is one clear example of this. Set to launch after Tears of the Kingdom on July 21, it’s priced back at the standard $AU79.95 price point. Meanwhile, Metroid Prime Remastered, shadow dropped during this week’s Nitnendo Direct, is just $AU59.95 (though some fans had previously hoped the entire trilogy would be available as part of a single collection).
When Nintendo first let the news of a $AU90 Zelda slip in a premature update to pre-order pages, some balked. On the one hand, it’s running on the same hardware that Breath of the Wild did six years ago, which is usually what publishers point to to justify price increases. On the other hand, it would probably be better if companies experimented more with pricing rather than try to make it up on the backend through tons of paid DLC, season passes, and expansions.
Nintendo is hardly alone in exploring higher prices, especially as many countries face record levels of inflation. Current-gen versions of most games recently adopted the $AU90 price point, a move Sony made for its first-party releases back when the PS5 first debuted. Microsoft, which resisted this trend early on in the Xbox Series X/S lifecycle, also announced upcoming price hikes at the end of last year. While Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 were both $AU99.95, Redfall and Starfield will both be $AU119.95.
Time will tell if Nintendo decides to take a similar stance when the Switch 2, or whatever its successor is called, is announced in the coming years. For now, however, it sounds like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be the exception rather than the rule.
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