Nintendo games, especially first-party titles, are notorious for sticking around $60 for years after release, only seeing significant discounts during major sales like Black Friday and Prime Day. However, that situation seems to be changing, at least for select first-party Switch games and pricey ports. For the past several months, games like Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Maker 2 have regularly been on sale for around $40, marking a major shift from recent years.
The growing trend seems to have started several months ago. For example, back in April, we covered a batch of Switch exclusives, including Breath of the Wild and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, going for $40 at Amazon. In June, many Switch exclusives were hovering around $42, but by July, they were back to $40 in a GameStop sale. Best Buy offered the same batch of games for $40 as part of its Labor Day Sale, and right now, as we near the end of September, both Amazon and Target are offering numerous Switch games for $40 each.
Pretty much every other major first-party Switch game you don’t see on that list is sitting at $49.94 on Amazon and Best Buy right now. Meanwhile, expensive third-party ports seem to fall in price faster these days as well. Three 2K collections–Borderlands: Legendary Collection, XCOM 2 Collection, and BioShock: The Collection–just launched in May at $50 each, and they’re already down to $30 at Amazon. Whether they’re $10 or $20 off, it’s incredibly strange to see so many major Switch games discounted at one time on a regular basis, but we seem to have reached the point in the Switch’s life cycle where this is now common.
Of course, we’re talking about Nintendo standards here. Some of these games are over three years old, and if they were PS4 or Xbox One games, they’d be going for 20 bucks at this point. But because Nintendo doesn’t need to drop the price on its games over time–people will keep buying them at $60, and you can’t play Mario on Xbox–spotting a $10 or $20 discount on a Switch game is a steal, even one that released in 2017.
The Nintendo Switch is currently more popular than ever before, with over 61 million systems sold as of August, so we don’t expect to see any of these games get a permanent price cut anytime soon–but if the last few months are any indication, $40 to $50 is now the new regular discount for first-party titles and other $60 Switch games. So if you’ve been thinking about picking up Super Mario Party or know someone who wants to buy Breath of the Wild, know that you don’t need to pay $60 for these titles anymore–chances are, you’ll find them on sale right now and may find them even cheaper within a week or two.
With Black Friday and Prime Day on the way, here’s hoping this means we see even bigger discounts in the near future. Last year, we saw a brief $30 discount on select Switch games that quickly rose back up to $40 during Black Friday, but with the $40 discount price being so common these days, we may see more Switch games going for $30 (and hopefully for longer) this holiday season.
