If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was not okay.
Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers. Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now that the Welcome Tour be free; even though they would not be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards.
On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious about their intellectual property in ways other companies do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes four times as much money per year from mobile gaming than Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty of fallback cash from the rest of their respective companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option.