As you likely know, Nintendo recently decided to hop on the $70 train started by PlayStation and co. a couple of years ago. Though not all Nintendo titles will be $70 moving forward (for now), such is the case for the highly anticipated upcoming entry in the acclaimed Zelda series, Tears of the Kingdom. This $10 bump was a bit more contentious than other publishers’, but there were still plenty of people defending it (which, in fairness, there is a case for).

AAA games had been $60 for a long time, and with the eternal reality of inflation consistently decreasing the value of the dollar, games were, in real terms, getting cheaper and cheaper by the year. Basically everything is more expensive now than it was two decades ago, but games were a rare exception, so it was only a matter of time before they had to adjust and raise their prices. Some people say that, if anything, this price hike came late.

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Games are more expensive than ever to make. Studios have hundreds of developers, each putting in hours and hours of work on the most minute details, with producers and coordinators making sure these huge teams are all aligned and everything is running smoothly. Modern development environments are much larger than before because there’s just a lot more that needs to be done in modern games. Every generation, graphical potency grows, and so do people’s expectations.

And though Tears of the Kingdom isn’t out yet, it’s pretty much a surefire guarantee that it’s going to be massive. Breath of the Wild had a humongous unrestricted open world that was brimming with different types of content. There’s no reason to think this game will be different, especially with its lengthy development time. You will probably be able to play it for dozens, maybe even hundreds, of hours, and still be engaged, finding new things.

Breath Of The Wild Open World

I’m not here to pretend that $70 is an unfair or unreasonable price for Tears of the Kingdom, but you can’t look at it in a vacuum. What I believe is that the price hike is unjustified, and Nintendo really could have and should have saved this $70 push for its next console. After all, amount of content has never been an indicator of price in the gaming industry. A 100-hour open-world game can cost just as much as a 15-hour campaign and no one ever bats an eyelid. Doug Bowser justifying this by saying that the price is going to 'reflect the experience' doesn’t make any sense, because that’s never been how the industry’s worked.

Yes, inflation and development costs have been on a consistent rise over the past couple of decades, but you know what else has been? Profits. Despite the long-standing $60 price point, gaming companies have pretty much only made more money as the years have gone by. Nintendo's net sales in 2022 were $14.7bn, which is their third-highest year net sales of all time, and second-highest ever year for net profit (via TweakTown). Clearly, Nintendo wasn't exactly going to collapse without that $10 price hike, was it?

As much as you want to criticize Sony, EA, Take-Two, and every other publisher that raised their prices, at least they attached their products to new next-gen consoles. Their $70 games have a distinct and notable improvement to them.

PlayStation 5 Xbox Series XS

I mean, okay, to keep it real, a lot of these are cross-gen titles. It’s not like every $70 PlayStation 5 game pushes the console's technical boundaries to the extreme, but they all provide you with a better experience than what you would have had on PlayStation 4. Even if it’s the same game, the extra $10 is netting you a higher framerate, higher resolution, and quicker load times. You as the consumer are getting something for the bump, there’s something to justify it.

Nintendo, on the other hand, is doing this for a title that’s probably only a fraction more advanced than Breath of the Wild, a title that will run on the exact same six-year-old hardware (not to mention the Wii U), which is far behind the rest of the industry in terms of processing power. The truth of the matter is that Nintendo has made Tears of the Kingdom more expensive without providing any valid reason as to why.

Tears Of The Kingdom Same

Worst of all, PlayStation and Xbox games almost always lower in price after a few years, even the really popular ones. Meanwhile, Switch launch games like Breath of the Wild are still $60. So, while $70 elsewhere is also kinda the price of playing next-gen games early, Tears of The Kingdom will most likely cost $70 forever.

Nintendo was going to make money on this game hand over fist regardless, we all know this. They could have totally waited for their next-generation console to raise their prices, but simply decided to jump the gun here with Tears of the Kingdom for no other reason than to make more money. And you know what? It'll probably sell like hot cakes. So touché, Nintendo, keep on doing what you do best; making great games and employing not-so-great business practices.

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