Doug Bowser, head of Nintendo USA, explained in a recent interview with The Associated Press how the games company arrived at its newly established $69.99 price tag for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
The standard edition of TotK, set to launch on May 12, will indeed cost a bit more than usual for Nintendo Switch games—a development that was first leaked in February right before pre-orders for the game started going out.
Hours after the change went into effect, Nintendo PR addressed concerns about the price hike, affirming that the $70 tag won’t be the new normal and that it will “determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis.”
This has been demonstrated with several of Nintendo’s other 2023 first-party games, with Metroid Prime Remastered being $39.99 and Pikmin 4 set to drop at $59.99.
According to the new comments from Bowser, it seems there’s more reason to believe that Nintendo’s promise wasn’t just for show. When asked about why the price was raised for TotK, Bowser told The Associated Press that it matches the quality of the experience the company believes it will be delivering to fans.
“We look at what the game has to offer,” Bowser told The Associated Press. “I think fans will find this is an incredibly full, deeply immersive experience. The price point reflects the type of experience that fans can expect when it comes to playing this particular game. This isn’t a price point that we’ll necessarily have on all our titles. It’s actually a fairly common pricing model either here or in Europe or other parts of the world, where the pricing may vary depending on the game itself.”
Sony and other developers slowly started moving the price tag for major releases to $70 in late 2020 with the release of the PlayStation 5. But the Switch, having been released in March 2017, remains drastically behind other flagship consoles on the market in terms of power and performance, which has been a point of contention for some.
With Bowser seemingly hinting elsewhere in the interview that there are no plans to release a new Switch soon, it seems the thought of tech-based performance vs. Nintendo’s perceived value of the game is something that may continue to be weighed by Zelda fans in the coming weeks.
Related: How to play The Legend of Zelda games in release order from Gamepur
