Pay to win on mobile?? This is revolutionary!!! /s
Now its pretty clear that they are happy to sell their AAA brand titles to the mobile casino people. And people worry that means that maybe Nintendo isn’t principled on this issue, just conservative and slow to adopt these things in the same way they were slow and conservative on online multiplayer. If that’s true, maybe soon after showing crazy profits this kind of crap is coming for all of their beloved franchises in mainline titles on Nintendo hardware.
It's possible, but I'd worry more if it starts showing up on their own consoles, instead of mobile titles that exist mostly to get people interested in playing on Nintendo's own hardware.
Which isn't to say that Nintendo doesn't do weird things with DLC elsewhere—there was a 3DS game where you could purchase minigames with real money, but let you haggle with the seller in-game to get a better price.
Nintendo's store also runs less-frequent and worse sales than others. Other stores, a two-year-old game might still be $50 full price, but it'll go on sale half-off multiple times per year. Not so much on Nintendo's store. Doubly so for first-party stuff. 20% off is a steep and rare sale for those, even older titles.
Mario Kart is also mostly course packs. Fun, but not vital.
I think the main factor's that Nintendo's got this weird cheap-on-the-hardware-side-premium-on-the-software-side thing going on. Which seems to be working for them—I'm not complaining, just observing, no other companies seem to have carved out a niche quite like that, so it's a distinctive characteristic of Nintendo.
So do you think this is the weird economics that's responsible for Nintendo shifting more to the 'standard' model of DLCs and possibly microtransactions? Because selling the hardware doesn't make as much sense nowadays?
That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think even the new paid DLC is a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
Didn't know some of the base-game tracks had been DLC on the Wii U—I skipped that console, like ~everyone else, it's the only Nintendo console I don't have in my house right this second in fact, unless you count the Virtual Boy.
> That doesn’t mean Mario Kart 8 is a bad deal! I think it’s a great value to keep adding high‐quality material to an existing game. It’s pretty fascinating to see how Nintendo has managed to keep a 2014 game going, and still succeeds at convincing people to buy it for $60—it still sells like hotcakes.
I mean, I'd happily have paid $60 for Double Dash on the Switch, instead, and that's ancient at this point. It's just as fun as the day it came out, and I like some of its features better (the second seat "gunner" role was great for playing Mario Kart with my kids when they were too young to steer the kart very well—though these days they can drive the karts themselves, no problem). Emulating it in such a fashion that everyone else in the house can just pick up and play is a bunch of work and requires dedicating some hardware to it. Keeping the Wii or Gamecube plugged in is annoying and I don't really have any TVs set up for easy plugged-in-controller play anymore, making it even worse (never liked the Wavebird and such, personally).
Hell I'd pay $60 to get Blur on the Switch (or PS4/5...) and that's not even a Nintendo title.
Yeah, I misread your original comment, so I edited my response a minute or two before you replied. My bad.
Much of that revenue likely comes from players buying egg incubators and raid passes, which both are essentially pay-to-win gambling. And just like Mario Kart Tour, there are hard caps on how much can be done per day without paying.