Nikkei Reports Nintendo Switch Price Of 25,000 Yen, Prompting $250 Speculation

[Megalith]

Practically all signs are pointing to the Nintendo Switch debuting at under $300. Do you think it will be worth getting at launch?

It seems likely that the larger retailers will be jumping in with solid pre-order offerings and pricing for the Nintendo Switch at the end of this week, but Nikkei has weighed in with a report on the Japanese price - 25,000 Yen. At current exchange rates that converts to around $214 / €203 / £174, but taxes and so on make $250 / €237 / £203 a feasible price. That would match up with speculation over the past few months, and would make sense if Nintendo is aiming for an affordable core offering and price, which is surely necessary after the launch struggles of 3DS and Wii U - both were considered relatively pricey when they were launched.

 

[azuza001]

Does it Mario cart bro? Then yes.

 

[swatbat]

Does it Mario cart bro? Then yes.

Sadly this. I'll end up getting one at some point for smash brothers and mario kart. Nintendo seemly has been trying to destroy some of their games(the paper mario sticker crap is a good example) but as long as some of the games look good I'll get it for the few first party nintendo games I want to play.

The new zelda looks good(although I can get it on the wii u) as well.

 

[azuza001]

Sadly this. I'll end up getting one at some point for smash brothers and mario kart. Nintendo seemly has been trying to destroy some of their games(the paper mario sticker crap is a good example) but as long as some of the games look good I'll get it for the few first party nintendo games I want to play.

The new zelda looks good(although I can get it on the wii u) as well.

I know what you mean, Mario rpg was one of my favorite she's titles, but the latest batches of paper Mario have really become their own... bad thing.

I would love some good games on the switch that we're not 1st party but I don't know how reasonable that is now. Nintendos system is nothing like ps4/xbone which can be a good thing, but the question is how easy will it be to put 3rd party games on Nintendos platform from a conversion pov. Not as easy as going back and forth between the other two I imagine.

 

[shad0w4life]

After what zelda was originally demoed as and what it looks like now, price cut is a must. It's pretty weak GPU wise it appears

 

[vegeta535]

I know what you mean, Mario rpg was one of my favorite she's titles, but the latest batches of paper Mario have really become their own... bad thing.

I would love some good games on the switch that we're not 1st party but I don't know how reasonable that is now. Nintendos system is nothing like ps4/xbone which can be a good thing, but the question is how easy will it be to put 3rd party games on Nintendos platform from a conversion pov. Not as easy as going back and forth between the other two I imagine.

You buy Nintendo systems only for their 1st party titles. I don't understand why people would want watered down versions of 3rd party titles on it when they can have much better versions on PC, PS4 and Xbone. Its not worth it to developers to make basically another game to run on Nintendo's system when they own a small market. Nintendo's systems in recent time have been at best a companion systems and not primary gaming systems.

 

[Prod1702]

After what zelda was originally demoed as and what it looks like now, price cut is a must. It's pretty weak GPU wise it appears

Nothing is for sure until next week. Also you aren't going to have a Xbox One or PS4 in the size the switch is. If you did, it would have like 30 mins of battery life. The Switch looks great and I can't wait to get one.

 

[ChadD]

After what zelda was originally demoed as and what it looks like now, price cut is a must. It's pretty weak GPU wise it appears

If your playing any zelda game for the graphics... I think your doing it wrong.

 

[Flogger23m]

$250 is fine, but I think there should be an option without the dock for $200 or so. For people intending on using it mobile only, $200 or less seems to be about as much as people will spend on a hand held. Although it looks like a higher quality, more complex device than the 3DS so I can see it costing more.

 

[swatbat]

I know what you mean, Mario rpg was one of my favorite she's titles, but the latest batches of paper Mario have really become their own... bad thing.

I would love some good games on the switch that we're not 1st party but I don't know how reasonable that is now. Nintendos system is nothing like ps4/xbone which can be a good thing, but the question is how easy will it be to put 3rd party games on Nintendos platform from a conversion pov. Not as easy as going back and forth between the other two I imagine.

Yea I honestly don't know what nintendo is thinking. I'm almost ready to bet that most developers that do make games are just going to make them run at the lower specs the system run on when on battery and not care about making anything look better when docked. With as underpowered as this console is I expect the same issues the wii u had. Sure those of us who really want to play nintendo's first party games will buy it but most people will stick with a xbox one or ps4 if they can only have 1.

If the new mario looks good(I wasn't a big fan of new super mario world and prefer normal 3d ones), the new smash brothers looks good, and the new mario kart looks good then I'll get one. I can get the zelda game on the wii u if needbe. I'd love to see a good paper mario, more new super mario brothers games, maybe a wario ware game again, etc. I've kinda given up on this thing being anything as far as third party support goes and really am not sure why I would buy a game on it vs on the xbox one.

 

[Armenius]

As soon as Nintendo shows me a new Metroid game worth buying, I will buy another one of their consoles.

 

[westrock2000]

Some say, that putting limitations on a developer forces them to create innovative and unique solutions.

Shitty sound chip? Create simplistic beats that are memorable and catchy.
Shitty graphics? Create games that focus on story or play style. Make games that make use of low quality graphics (Banjo Kazooie).

Remember the flicker on NES? That was to get around sprite limitations by only drawing sprites for 1/2 a frame cycle. It was an innovative solution.

Now you have unlimited audio quality. Very high texture quality. There isn't really any reason to be an "engineer", just an "artist".

 

[mls1995]

I had a Wii U so yeah, I'd probably pay $250 again to play Mario in HD. I doubt I'd buy too many games this time, I wasted a lot of money on some mediocre Wii U games. I probably only needed like 5 games total.

 

[Drakensoul]

$250 is fine, but I think there should be an option without the dock for $200 or so. For people intending on using it mobile only, $200 or less seems to be about as much as people will spend on a hand held. Although it looks like a higher quality, more complex device than the 3DS so I can see it costing more.

GPU performance is neutered in mobile form. Like cut in half. I'm hoping they don't optimize games for half of the 'system''s possible performance, and thus glad they're not selling a mobile-only version of it (in which case they would probably be legally required to optimize for it).

I had a Wii U so yeah, I'd probably pay $250 again to play Mario in HD. I doubt I'd buy too many games this time, I wasted a lot of money on some mediocre Wii U games. I probably only needed like 5 games total.

Nintendo should sell a first-party package with their systems. For <unknown amount of extra money>, you get a ticket that gives you access to Metroid, Zelda, Smash, and Mario franchise games as they're released. Like a buy-ahead.

 

[azuza001]

Yea I honestly don't know what nintendo is thinking. I'm almost ready to bet that most developers that do make games are just going to make them run at the lower specs the system run on when on battery and not care about making anything look better when docked. With as underpowered as this console is I expect the same issues the wii u had. Sure those of us who really want to play nintendo's first party games will buy it but most people will stick with a xbox one or ps4 if they can only have 1.

If the new mario looks good(I wasn't a big fan of new super mario world and prefer normal 3d ones), the new smash brothers looks good, and the new mario kart looks good then I'll get one. I can get the zelda game on the wii u if needbe. I'd love to see a good paper mario, more new super mario brothers games, maybe a wario ware game again, etc. I've kinda given up on this thing being anything as far as third party support goes and really am not sure why I would buy a game on it vs on the xbox one.

But nintendo in the past had amazing 3rd party Support. Goldeneye on the n64, fzero on the GameCube (Yes fzero is their property but Sega did it and I loved it), I could go on.

They lost their way at some point I don't know if they changed as a company and made it harder to work on their console from a license pov or what happened but the list of wii u games that I thought looked amazing were low. I hope the switch fixes this. Get us fun games that don't require mad leet skills to play.

I think, looking from the outside in, that maybe it was the wii that did it. The system had so much crap on it that finding anything not crap was an achievement in itself. So the system that made them millions hurt their future endeavors. Just a hypothesis.

 

[Derangel]

But nintendo in the past had amazing 3rd party Support. Goldeneye on the n64, fzero on the GameCube (Yes fzero is their property but Sega did it and I loved it), I could go on.

They lost their way at some point I don't know if they changed as a company and made it harder to work on their console from a license pov or what happened but the list of wii u games that I thought looked amazing were low. I hope the switch fixes this. Get us fun games that don't require mad leet skills to play.

I think, looking from the outside in, that maybe it was the wii that did it. The system had so much crap on it that finding anything not crap was an achievement in itself. So the system that made them millions hurt their future endeavors. Just a hypothesis.

Goldeneye was a 1st party game. Nintendo owned a majority stake in the company at the time. Nintendo lost it's 3rd party support during the 64 era due to how they treated them and due to using cartridges. Sony's system was not only easier and cheaper to develop for, but it was cheaper to release games on, and Sony was courting 3rd parties left and right. Nintendo's attitude was "3rd parties will do whatever we tell them to do just because we're Nintendo". Since then they've just not provided a lot of compelling reasons for 3rd parties to return. The mini-discs the Gamecube used had too little storage spacel compared to the DVDs the PS2 and Xbox were using and 3rd party games really didn't sell terribly well on the console. The attach rate for games on the Wii was pretty bad, outside of a handful of titles. The Wii U just sold like shit, there was no point in 3rd parties supporting it.

 

[Xinmosni]

But nintendo in the past had amazing 3rd party Support. Goldeneye on the n64, fzero on the GameCube (Yes fzero is their property but Sega did it and I loved it), I could go on.

They lost their way at some point I don't know if they changed as a company and made it harder to work on their console from a license pov or what happened but the list of wii u games that I thought looked amazing were low. I hope the switch fixes this. Get us fun games that don't require mad leet skills to play.

I think, looking from the outside in, that maybe it was the wii that did it. The system had so much crap on it that finding anything not crap was an achievement in itself. So the system that made them millions hurt their future endeavors. Just a hypothesis.

You're confusing 3rd party with 2nd party.

 

[ChadD]

But nintendo in the past had amazing 3rd party Support. Goldeneye on the n64, fzero on the GameCube (Yes fzero is their property but Sega did it and I loved it), I could go on.

They lost their way at some point I don't know if they changed as a company and made it harder to work on their console from a license pov or what happened but the list of wii u games that I thought looked amazing were low. I hope the switch fixes this. Get us fun games that don't require mad leet skills to play.

I think, looking from the outside in, that maybe it was the wii that did it. The system had so much crap on it that finding anything not crap was an achievement in itself. So the system that made them millions hurt their future endeavors. Just a hypothesis.

I would argue that it wasn't Nintendo that lost their way it was the industry in general.

They bought into what Microsoft started selling. The industry decided that console gamers really wanted PC games... and at some point the money people decided it was cheaper to go the other way round.

Nintendo stayed true making systems to create console games on.

I believe the switch is Nintendos time to bring back console games. Over the last 5-10 years an entire generation of coders have been pushing the whole mobile gaming thing. That market is maturing and now those same money people are going to see that turning that Android / Ios game into a full fledged Nintendo console game isn't going to cost a ton more or be laughed off the system by end users. Nintendo I believe was smart to allow Sony and MS to burn cash trying to one up each other in their race to imitate a half decent gaming PC.... neither one of them makes all that much actual profit on any software. Nintendo was wise to step aside and allow them to weaken themselves. WiiU may not have made them a fortune, but it didn't loose them anything... and turning a small profit is better then loosing money which is what MS has always done and until just the last few quarters Sony hadn't made a profit since the PS2.

Switch should be fun... and I expect we will see lots of smaller developers hitting the system. I doubt we see many of the "big house" AAA PC / PS4 / Xbone titles add Switch support... still I expect there will be a ton of third party support for switch.

They could also do the same thing Nvidia was doing before they scrapped their own hardware to build Nintendos... and offer a game streaming service. Nvidia baked a bunch of game streaming codecs into the Tegra chip... I have see the Nvidia service in action... and I gotta say if you have fast stable internet you really could stream PC games on nightmare settings on the shield.

 

[disemboweler]

GPU performance is neutered in mobile form. Like cut in half. I'm hoping they don't optimize games for half of the 'system''s possible performance, and thus glad they're not selling a mobile-only version of it (in which case they would probably be legally required to optimize for it).


Nintendo should sell a first-party package with their systems. For <unknown amount of extra money>, you get a ticket that gives you access to Metroid, Zelda, Smash, and Mario franchise games as they're released. Like a buy-ahead.

They CLAIM the reduced GPU speed is just enough to push the 720p mobile screen at the same graphical settings as the 1080p docked TV output... that could be true, based on the paper specs. They'll figure out a way to mess it up but that could work if they really made the effort.

Also not only would buying future "unknown" Nintendo games that will come out years in the future either a terrible decision for almost any consumer, or, would lose Nintendo a good chunk of the paltry amount of software-attach-rate spending people already do for their systems in recent years. That'd be a lose-lose situation, or just a lose situation for the consumer. Unless you want to pay almost full price for a 5-pack of titles, 3 of which are likely to be total shit like the recent Star Fox and Paper Mario were (or the Super Mario Creator game for 3DS, whatever it's called, it's TERRIBLE compared to the already deeply flawed WiiU version).

 

[disemboweler]

I would argue that it wasn't Nintendo that lost their way it was the industry in general.

They bought into what Microsoft started selling. The industry decided that console gamers really wanted PC games... and at some point the money people decided it was cheaper to go the other way round.

Nintendo stayed true making systems to create console games on.

I believe the switch is Nintendos time to bring back console games. Over the last 5-10 years an entire generation of coders have been pushing the whole mobile gaming thing. That market is maturing and now those same money people are going to see that turning that Android / Ios game into a full fledged Nintendo console game isn't going to cost a ton more or be laughed off the system by end users. Nintendo I believe was smart to allow Sony and MS to burn cash trying to one up each other in their race to imitate a half decent gaming PC.... neither one of them makes all that much actual profit on any software. Nintendo was wise to step aside and allow them to weaken themselves. WiiU may not have made them a fortune, but it didn't loose them anything... and turning a small profit is better then loosing money which is what MS has always done and until just the last few quarters Sony hadn't made a profit since the PS2.

Switch should be fun... and I expect we will see lots of smaller developers hitting the system. I doubt we see many of the "big house" AAA PC / PS4 / Xbone titles add Switch support... still I expect there will be a ton of third party support for switch.

They could also do the same thing Nvidia was doing before they scrapped their own hardware to build Nintendos... and offer a game streaming service. Nvidia baked a bunch of game streaming codecs into the Tegra chip... I have see the Nvidia service in action... and I gotta say if you have fast stable internet you really could stream PC games on nightmare settings on the shield.

Do you have one? I keep hearing people say it works, on their local network, but the input lag is noticeably bad even on the LAN. Add the Internet ping time to that, and you'll MAYBE be ok playing a single player strategy game and things like that, but not anything competitive that requires speedy reflexes or most action games. One of these sources is a friend who has one (mostly used now for streaming Netflix and other non-interactive apps), and he said it was mostly junk unless you play specific types of games only, and don't mind a disadvantage even in single player modes, and the loss in graphic fidelity on top of that (due to video compression, etc).

 

[ChadD]

Do you have one? I keep hearing people say it works, on their local network, but the input lag is noticeably bad even on the LAN. Add the Internet ping time to that, and you'll MAYBE be ok playing a single player strategy game and things like that, but not anything competitive that requires speedy reflexes or most action games. One of these sources is a friend who has one (mostly used now for streaming Netflix and other non-interactive apps), and he said it was mostly junk unless you play specific types of games only, and don't mind a disadvantage even in single player modes, and the loss in graphic fidelity on top of that (due to video compression, etc).

A cousin of mine has one... I noticed no real lag at all and the games where clearly PC versions with everything cranked, for sure smoother game play then I would of got on those setting out of my admittedly aging PC. Having said that he is on fiber and not cheap fiber for any gaming his connection is the best I have ever used. So having said that I won't claim to say it works wonderfully on cable or dsl... still the tech clearly works and has promise.

I tend to think Nintendo isn't going to go the streaming route in NA anyway... I could only imagine it wouldn't be up to par on most people in NAs home networks. Having said that I would be shocked if they didn't launch some type of streaming service in Japan and a handful of other countries where internet service is a few notches better then ours. Still wouldn't be shocked to see a version of it launch in NA with less hype consdiering Nvidia appears to be ending their own plans for Nintendos sake.

 

[Ranulfo]

Does it Mario cart bro? Then yes.

Negative for me. I've dont that now with the Wii and Wii U. Twice is enough for now. I'll see how things shake out over the next 1-2 years. Nintendo won't even put their digital versions of wii u games on sale often or at all. Been tough to find disc copies also.