Since Nintendo revealed its new console, the prices of both Switch 2 itself and Mario Kart World haven’t exactly gone down well. It’s also had a third price controversy horseman of the apocalypse to address too – why the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour doesn’t come bundled in with the console for free.
To be fair, after a period of initial silence, Ninty has at least tried to explain to folks why it’s opted to change the amounts it has for all of this stuff, whipping out phrases like “variable pricing” and in the case of the Welcome Tour, the at least pretty reasonable on paper explanation that the price came down to stuff like “the amount of care and work that the team put into it”.
Now, former Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé has commented on the Welcome Tour bit of the discourse without explicitly saying much at all. Instead, all he’s done is cheekily share a few very specific clips of him explaining the battle he had trying to convince Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto to be comfortable packing-in some games with consoles for free.
The first tweet in the thread links to him telling IGN back in 2022 about this kind of fight with Wii Sports and the Wii, which ended up being bundled together everywhere but in Japan. The second’s about bundling Wii Play with the Wii Remote, and then there’s a final clip the exec’s introduced in this thread by declaring “and the results”.
Basically, in both cases, the call to bundle these quite ‘show off the hardware’-ish sorts of games paid off pretty well, at least in terms of helping the games gain traction and be put in front of a lot of players – the kind of thing you want with a bit of software that shows off all the bells and whistles of the new device they’ve just bought and are probably considering spending more cash on going forwards.
So, it’s not a stretch to see this as big Reggie suggesting that packing-in the Welcome Tour rather than charging for it might have had similarly positive results for big Ninty this time around. It’s an interesting debate to have, if nothing else.
Are you still scratching your head about the Switch 2 Welcome Tour not being delivered in the same way the likes of Astro’s Playroom have been? Let us know below!
