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Some 45 years ago, Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto sat down and created a potbellied Italian plumber who lives in Mushroom Kingdom to be the player character in 1981’s Donkey Kong — now he’s the reason Nintendo is charging $80 for some of the upcoming Switch 2 games. Or at least, that’s one reason for the software price hike, according to former Sony Interactive Entertainment president Shawn Layden.
The topic of the Switch 2 price and the $80 Mario Kart World is so hot right now that I truly feel like I’ve written this same story before, but well, here we go again. Yes, the Switch 2 is $450 in the US, although opinions differ on whether that price will stick after president Trump’s tariffs, and yes, some games are going to cost $80, including the number one heavyweight of the Switch 2 launch lineup, Mario Kart World. Lots of people have lots of things to say about all of this, including Layden, who reckons folks will still line up to shell out for everyone’s favorite shell stomper.
Pushing back against the current industry trend away from console exclusivity, Layden argued during a recent episode of the PlayerDriven podcast (timestamp) that, at least for Nintendo, exclusives are major drivers of hardware sales.
“Right here you see, ‘wow, that’s kind of a hefty price hike from Switch 1 to Switch 2 and, wow, 80 bucks for a game?’ But if it’s the only place where you can play Mario, then you get your wallet out and you buy into it… and Donkey Kong and Zelda. That first-party exclusivity mitigates that sticker shock, if you will, of these price hikes, because you want that content so bad.”
Ultimately, we won’t know if Layden will be proven correct until the months and years after the Switch 2’s release when we can have some long-term sales data to look at, but it’s likely true that Nintendo has a loyal base of diehards that’ll pay whatever they need to in order to play new Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda games. What remains to be seen is just how large that base is, and whether the console will have the same mass appeal of its wildly successful predecessor.