A new Nintendo Switch report is bad news for your wallet. Nintendo Switch games are already more expensive than PC, PlayStation and Xbox games for several reasons. First, Nintendo eShop sales are not as plentiful or charitable as sales on Steam or the PlayStation Store. Meanwhile, many of the console’s biggest and best games rarely receive appreciable discounts, especially if they are published by Nintendo. And finally, although not as common in the old days, the Nintendo Switch fee, which refers to the fact that a game has more money on the Switch compared to other platforms, still exists. That said, it looks like games on Switch and Switch Lite are about to become even more expensive.
Over Reddit, SMG Studio – the developer behind it Death Squared, a popular independent puzzle game – claims that the Nintendo eShop has a new rule that will prevent games from being less than $ 1.99. Of course, free games will remain free, but the developer claims that the days of games that will be on sale for $ 0.99 and less are over.
Now, contrary to this report, two games – The Plague Road and HoPiko –– are currently on sale for $ 0.99, making them the cheapest games on the platform today. There are plenty of other games on sale, but none of them violate the aforementioned $ 1.99 price tag.
At the surface level, this seems to remove the demand from SMG Studio, but, as the developer remarks, their game was also recently 0.99 USD, but that’s because they planned to sell in August. In other words, these two games can be in a similar boat. The fact that they are the only two games on sale for less than $ 0.99 suggests that this is the case. There are still a lot of other games listed for $ 0.99, but this is their normal price and again they are probably good.
That said, for now, take everything here with a grain of salt. Nothing here is official and so far Nintendo has not provided any comment or clarification. If this changes, we will be sure to update the story. As for why Nintendo would do this, who knows. It might have something to do with the eShop’s top sales page, which has been full of games falling at cheap prices, but for now, that’s just speculation.