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Comment by generj | Hacker News Reader

The "market" will bear varying levels of cost though. The demand and supply curves are curves and not lines intersecting at 90 degree angles. Often a firm can make more money by lowering price because of the higher quantity.

I believe Nintendo would be better off making little to no money on the Joycons. As a spillover of Switch owners having more Joycons and thus the ability to play with their friends, Nintendo will sell more multiplayer games and more Switches.

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Switches are perpetually sold out. Maybe they could sell more multiplayer games, but I'm betting they can actually charge a premium for the controllers right now because there's a lot of demand to play that can't be met by people getting their own console.

This may be true in some areas but where I live every retailer (gamestop, target, best buy, walmart, fred meyer) is full of available switches, with no bundles attached, selling at MSRP (no additional markup). It's been like that for about a month. I'm sure they will start selling out again as we get closer to the holidays. That said, I'm with the OP in that Nintendo would make more money off me if they sold the controllers for less. So far I bought 3 games (Mario Kart [again!], Street Fighter II [again!], and Super Mario Odyssey), all of which have multiplayer modes, but none of which we have played multiplayer more than once because using the tiny joycons sideways is just terrible, but the cost of an additional controller is too much. It's not that I can't afford it, it's just that the value isn't there. So far, none of the games is good enough that it's worth spending the extra $$ to buy another controller. If the controllers were $40 I would have bought 2 of them by now, probably. I get how silly that sounds.

Many games, especially the ones that let you play with a sideways joycon, are fully-functional with gamecube controllers and an adapter. I know Mario Kart is for sure.

The drawbacks are the missing motion, "minus", and ZL buttons. If the game works without that and you have some gamecube controllers already, getting an adapter could be a good idea.

Where do you live it took me most of my weekend to find one in a store in Seattle?

Silverdale / Bremerton / Poulsbo area out in Kitsap County.

I believe Nintendo would be better off making little to no money on the Joycons.

What's funny if you abstract this concept out a bit in becomes "I believe the company would be better off making little to no money on their products."

Joking aside, that sounds like quite the gamble to me. And it doesn't appear to me that Nintendo likes that gamble, as they have been pretty averse to taking losses on hardware in the past.

Not to mention I don't know of too many other console makers that are willing to take losses on the accessories.

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