Nintendo’s $90 Price Tag: Capitalism’s Latest Loot Box
How One Corporation’s Greed Sets the Stage for Industry-Wide Exploitation — and Why Gamers Always Pay the Price
To most of you reading this, you probably don’t know I game in my spare time. Not because gaming is some escape from "real life" — no, because it's one of the few cultural spaces not completely ravaged by the profit-driven psychosis of late capitalism. Or at least, it used to be when I was growing up from the fifth to seventh console generations. But here comes Nintendo — the smiling face of corporate nostalgia — trying to gouge us all yet again with their so-called "Next Console," the Nintendo Switch 2.
Now, I saw the trailer. Glossy, colourful, family-friendly — pure ideological bait to mask what's really happening behind the scenes: Nintendo is jacking up the prices of their games. Not to $70, not even the already ridiculous $60 we've been conditioned to accept as “normal” — no, ninety. 90 GBP. 90 USD. That’s a 50% increase from the standard £60 and a 28.57% hike from £70. For what? A console that can’t even match the Steam Deck in performance, let alone the PS5 or Xbox Series X!?
What, exactly, gives Nintendo the divine right to demand more for less?
They’re not some scrappy underdog in need of support. This is a multinational corporate entity sitting on a mountain of cash, swimming in profits from first-party titles like Mario and Zelda. Let’s run the numbers, shall we? The Mario franchise alone on the Switch platform has sold approximately 252.87 million units. Let’s be generous — say each of those sold at $60. That’s $15.17 billion USD in revenue from Mario alone. Not even touching Zelda, not even scratching the surface of Pokémon or Animal Crossing, etc.
And what about development costs?
They’re infuriatingly opaque — because of course they are. Why would Nintendo reveal the grotesque disparity between production cost and profit margin when they can quietly rake it in while pretending they're offering “magic”? But let’s go by what we can piece together:
Super Mario Odyssey reportedly cost $120M to make.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? $10M. Just a Wii U repackaging.
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury? Maybe $30M. Again, mostly reused assets.
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe? Ports like this cost under $5M, if even that.
Mario Party Superstars and Mario Maker 2? Budget estimates sit comfortably below AAA levels — let’s be generous and say mid-range budgets at best.
Add it all up, and we’re talking $235M to $275M in development costs across all major Mario titles on the Switch. That’s roughly 1.55% to 1.81% of the $15.17 billion in revenue they’ve raked in. One point five percent.
It gets worse. Nintendo’s total R&D spend in 2023? Around $827M — and that’s for the entire company. Not just games, not just Mario — hardware, software, services, the works. Even if we ascribe all of that to Mario (which would be ludicrous), it still only represents 5.45% of the Mario revenue.
So why the price hike?
Because they can. Because consumer loyalty is now something to be exploited, not respected. Because scarcity, nostalgia, and intellectual property under capitalism are tools for extraction, not enrichment. Nintendo is not innovating — they are extracting value from our collective childhoods and packaging it for higher and higher margins while doing the bare minimum in return.
This isn’t about game development costs. It’s not about inflation. It’s about profit maximization at the expense of working-class consumers. It’s about pushing the market’s limits to see how much more capital they can wring from people who just want to enjoy a damn game without feeling like they’re being pickpocketed at every turn.
Nintendo doesn’t need to raise their prices.
They want to — because in the cold logic of capital, enough is never enough.
For those that want to argue in corporate PR-speak — parroting the tired, recycled lines about “high development costs,” “inflation,” or “the increasing complexity of modern games” — spare us the bootlicking. That ideological smokescreen has been debunked not just in the gaming industry but across every sector of the capitalist economy. Prices aren’t rising because companies need to charge more — they’re rising because they can. FULL STOP!
Inflation? Development costs? These are justifications, not causes. What we’re seeing is a systemic, class-based mechanism of upward wealth transfer. The cost of labour and production hasn’t skyrocketed — corporate profit margins have. In fact, reports across multiple industries — from food and energy to entertainment and tech — show that the post-COVID price hikes were not about survival, they were about expansion. CEOs and shareholders seized on inflationary narratives to raise prices far beyond what was needed to maintain operations. The result? Record profits. Record stock buybacks! Record bonuses!
And the gaming industry is no exception. In fact, it’s one of the worst offenders. Companies are laying off developers by the thousands, shuttering studios that created beloved titles — all while their executives’ brag in investor calls about record-breaking quarters. What kind of development crisis is this, where profits are higher than ever but the people who actually make the games are losing their jobs?
This is capitalism doing what capitalism does best: commodifying culture, alienating labour, and blaming the consequences on everything but itself.
Nintendo isn’t suffering. They’re thriving. Their revenue streams are diversified across digital marketplaces, merchandise, licensing deals, and mobile monetization. And when they raise the price of a game to $90, it’s not because the game is worth that — it’s because they know you’ll pay it. Not because of rational pricing models, but because they’ve emotionally monopolized generations of players with IPs that prey on our nostalgia and sense of comfort. They turn art into bait and then hike the price once you're hooked.
So let’s cut through the bullshit: this isn’t about development. It’s not about inflation. It’s about extraction — economic parasitism by a corporate elite who sit atop an industry built on the backs of underpaid developers and loyal consumers. Prices are rising because capitalism has run out of new frontiers to exploit — so now it feeds on its own audience.
And if we don’t call it out — if we keep apologizing for their excesses — we’re just helping them sharpen the knife.
If Nintendo gets away with this — and let’s be honest, they will — they won’t just be charging more for games. They’ll be setting the ideological standard for how much entertainment is worth under capitalism. And once that new ceiling is normalized — once they test the waters and discover that millions will pay $90 without revolt — the rest of the industry will fall in line like vultures circling a fresh kill. Because that’s how capitalist markets operate: not through innovation, but through competitive imitation for maximum surplus extraction.
Let’s break this down: in theory, we're told markets are based on "supply and demand." That prices reflect value. That competition drives prices down, benefiting the consumer. But that’s a fairy tale — a neat little lie taught in intro economics classes to obscure the brutal reality of class warfare. In real capitalist markets, especially ones dominated by a few massive players — like the gaming industry — prices don’t reflect costs or competition. They reflect what consumers can be conditioned to accept.
Once one dominant firm like Nintendo hikes the price and faces no serious backlash — no consumer revolt, no market penalty — it sets a precedent. Competitors look at that and say: "If they can charge $90 for a game, why are we still settling for $70?" And just like that, the floor shifts. The new “normal” is established not by reason, not by necessity, but by profit-seeking behaviour disguised as business strategy.
And who loses in this game of corporate follow-the-leader?
Not the corporations. They're insulated by years of built-up capital, diversified revenue streams, and vast marketing machinery that manufactures consent for every new exploitation. No, the ones who lose are the consumers, especially working-class players — the very people who built this industry from the ground up, who now find themselves priced out of the cultural spaces they helped create.
And it doesn’t stop at games. Once $90 becomes the standard, publishers will experiment with deluxe editions at $120, with "early access" at $150, and with subscription services that charge you monthly just to play games you already bought. This is called price creep, and under capitalism, it never stops — because it’s not about sustainability. It’s about accumulation. Always more. Always upward. Always at your expense.
This is not a Nintendo problem. This is a capitalist problem. A systemic problem. The market isn’t some neutral force — it’s a battlefield of class struggle, and the pricing of games is just the newest front. What Nintendo is doing is not innovative, it’s not “premium content,” and it’s certainly not necessary. It’s a stress test on your willingness to be exploited — and if you let it slide, every other corporate player will take it as a green light to do the same.
Because in the end, under capitalism, there are no ethical markets — only profitable ones!