Metroid Dread and the $60 price debate.
After being revealed at E3 2021, Metroid Dread has been the subject of some debate on the internet about whether it is worth the $60 price tag, but if you looked at all the articles written, and videos made on the subject, it is rather one-sided. “Of course it is,” they say, but the thing is the people writing these articles are not the best judge of this. Many of them will never pay for Metroid Dread to begin with, getting free review copies, or they are such hardcore game collectors that they buy more games than they even have time to play. To put this in perspective, the average Switch owner owns ten games. I personally own more than sixty, and this would be a small collection for somebody who has a livelihood revolving around games.
So, I am offering another perspective. When it comes to the question of whether Metroid Dread is worth $60, the best judge is not whether Metroid fans think it’s worth $60, but whether the average gamer, who owns ten switch games, and loves adventure games and metroidvanias, but has never played Metroid would pay $60 for it. My answer to this is no.
A few things of note, a game doesn’t have an inherent value. A game is worth what a person is willing to pay for it, and the glut of overpriced “special editions” in the game industry is poof of that. Once again, fans are willing to pay $60 for a game series they love. Most game publishers are well aware of this, so they price their games at $60 dollars at launch. However, most game publishers drop their prices pretty quickly. Look at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It is the fastest selling Assassin’s Creed game, getting those sales on the backs of good will from the previous game Odyssey, and the series as a whole, they then reduce the price.
Why do they do this? Why price a game that is hugely successful at a discount just six months after it came out? The reason for this is obvious. They already got all the people who were going to buy the game no matter what. For Ubisoft, the company that owns Assassins Creed, they want to get the people who are on the fence, who have never played a game in this series, and might love it, and become future fans, making the next game in the series even bigger.
This is not the model that Nintendo follows. Nintendo puts their games at $60, and keeps them there. They might have a sale every now and then, but if a game costs $60 at launch, you expect to pay close to that five years after launch. Ninetendo even usually charges full price for remakes, remasters and ports of older games, throwing in something extra too, to be fair, but they are dedicated to the hard $60 dollar price point.
The problem is, this works fine for Mario, Zelda. and Pokémon, but not so well for Nintendo’s large stable of mid tier franchises, many of which, like Metroid, often get neglected in favor of those big three. Metroid is a series that hasn’t had a new 2D game in nearly two decades, and hasn’t had a new Metroid game at all since Samus Returns, a remake of the second Metroid game, that was released on the 3DS in 2017.
That game was priced at $40, and it sold a little over half a million units. Since Metroid Dread is a new Metroid game, it can be expected to do better, but at $60 how much better? The bar for success for a Metroid game, and a lesser Switch property is around 2 million.
So, here is an empirical test of my pricing argument. If Metroid Dread sells more than 2 million units, which would make it the best selling Metroid game since the first one, then $60 is a good price for it. If it sells less than 2 million, that means it will underperform Pikmin 3 Deluxe, a port of an older Wii U game in a niche franchise. Expecting Metroid to sell as well as a port of Pikmin is not an unreasonable expectation.
Many people will quibble with this. They’ll say, “Only two Metroid games have sold over 2 million!” Yes, and they were on systems with smaller install bases than the Switch. My whole point of why Nintendo should price Metroid Dread at $40 is they should be trying to build up a smaller tier franchise that has struggled. I would actually be fine with Nintendo selling Dread at $60 if they reduced their prices over time, but they don’t, and we know this game will be $60 in a year after release, just like it will be on day one.
There are a few arguments people make to counter my argument and I will address them.
2D GAMES AREN’T WORTH LESS
My main issue with this argument is that people who are making it are assuming this is the argument about why Dread is not worth $60. So far in the Switch’s life cycle, they have made only one major new 2D game in an established franchise, and that game is Kirby Star Allies. In my opinion, that game was not worth $60, but it had nothing to do with being 2D. The game simply isn’t that good, and when it was released it didn’t have much content. Nintendo fixed this with free DLC, but the game is worth $40 at best at this point. (I do have a friend who loves this game, and has beaten it several times, which proves how subjective value is.)
To me, a 2D game that is definitely worth $60 is Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. I’ve been dragged into an argument about whether ports are worth $60 before, but let me side step that to say, this game was definitely worth $60 as a new game, and is one of the best 2D platformers of all time. I am on the record of saying Nintendo should discount their games over time like other publishers, so trying to drag me into some weird argument about it being a port is pettifogging. The point is, it sold 2.65 million on the Switch, as a port, and Metroid Dread, a new game, is very unlikely to get even close to that.
This proves that it isn’t about being 2D. The reason Tropical Freeze is worth $60 is because it offers an experience that the average gamer can’t get somewhere else for less money. Metroid Dread doesn’t do this, beyond being a Metroid game. One person I was talking to took this argument to be nonsensical, because they said I was proposing a world where Metroid never existed. Not at all. What this person was doing was projecting their familiarity with the IP and creator onto the average person. I don’t dispute that the game is worth $60 to people who have played the previous four games in the timeline, I’m saying it isn’t worth it specifically to the person who hasn’t to jump on as a new person.
If you’re a gamer unfamiliar with Metroid and are interested in the series, you not only have to be willing to swallow the $60 price tag, but you have to be willing to swallow it over the option of paying $15 for Hollow Knight, or $40 for Bloodstained, or $20 for Salt and Sanctuary. Hell, if you want a sci-fi game about a woman trying to find her way through a ship whole being chased by an unstoppable monster, Alien Isolation is less than $40 on the eshop.
Metroid fans might not like this, but Metroid Dread looks like an indie game to the average gamer, and therefore they will think about this when making their purchase. Hell, I think it’s an “uglier” game than Bloodstained, or Hollow Knight, and while this is mostly just opinion, there are certainly people who will pick those games over Metroid on aesthetic alone, before you even bring price into it.
When discussing value, if somebody is willing to give you the equivalent thing for less money, then you usually go with the person charging less. As I’ve already said, the average Switch owner owns ten games. If Sony or Microsoft owned Metroid and made a game that looked like Dread, there is no way they would charge $60 for it, and everybody knows this. This is not a 2D thing, it’s a Nintendo thing. (more on this when talking about indie games.)
INDIE GAMES ARE UNDERVALUED AND METROID DREAD COSTS MORE TO MAKE.
These two arguments crack me up, because people who defend the $60 Dread price point make them, apparently not realizing they contradict each other. I’ll address the indie games being undervalued first.
Hollow Knight is one of the most successful indie games in recent history. There is no doubt that if it were sold at $60 it would not be, even though it is so beloved. Hollow Knight has sold more copies than any 2D Metroid game has, and almost as much as the bestselling Metroid game, Metroid Prime, despite being a new IP. The reason it did this was a combination of its quality and its price.
I can’t get data on exactly what the budget was for Hollow Knight, but I know what the Kickstarter raised. Let’s just inflate the budget and say it was a million dollars. (This could include any overheads, and their kickstarter pledge rewards.) At $15, the 2.8 million copies of Hollow Knight sold equals 42 million dollars.
Stop and think about it for a minute. Team Cherry, who made Hollow Knight, consists of four people. Let’s assume their budget and overheads, and costs to keep the company running shaved twelve million dollars off that number, just to make sure we aren’t undercounting. That still leaves 30 million dollars divided by four people. Each of the four people who made Hollow Knight, assuming they share profits equally just pocketed 7.5 million dollars on a single game, enough to never make another game if they didn’t want to.
How is Hollow Knight “undervalued” if at the price it was sold at was enough to make every single person involved in making it a multimillionaire. That is a truly weird definition of valued. In reality, Hollow Knight was perfectly priced because it did what Team Cherry wanted, made them a huge profit, and sold numbers big enough to ensure a built in audience for future games, which they could possibly price higher because they now have a reputation.
The whole “indie games are undervalued” argument comes from an idea that indie games are as valuable as triple A games, and in terms of artistic merit, fun, time played, they are. I thought Hollow Knight was as rich an experience as any triple A game, but even if you disagree, the fact the game is so highly regarded can’t have escaped you. However, there is an assumption here, that being that triple A games are worth $60.
There is a big contradiction between saying indie games are undervalued, but then saying Metroid Dread should cost more than an indie game because it cost less to make. From an artistic perspective, a game is worth it’s artistic merit. From a business perspective, a game is worth as much as somebody will pay for it. These are not the same thing when talking about value, and both rely on the subjectivity of the “consumer,” for lack of a better word, yet they do overlap. Somebody is willing to pay more for something based on how much they love it, but nobody knows how much they love something until they experience it.
So, Hollow Knight was lower priced to get people to try it, and it paid off. There is nothing undervalued here. I would say that Nintendo should price Metroid Dread at $40 for the same reason. The Metroid brand needs to be built up, and they have another game on the way with Metroid Prime 4, which they could then charge $60 for, not because 3D games are worth more, but because they need to pull people in. Many “indie authors” will discount the first book in a book series they have written, not because they think the first book is worth less, but to lower the barrier for entry.
Nintendo doesn’t do this. Nearly everything they put out is priced at $60 and stays that way. Which brings us to the budget argument. I have no doubt that Metroid Dread costs more than Hollow Knight. I also think budget should be a consideration when running a business and pricing a game. The problem with this argument is assuming I don’t agree with that. The point is, I’m not arguing Nintendo should price Dread at $15 or $20, but $40, and they would actually make about the same amount of money at that price, while introducing more people to Metroid.
If you take this, “games should cost more based in their budgets” to heart, then you should then assume that triple A games should not cost the uniform $60, soon to be $70, but that every game should be priced in accordance with its budget. Yeah, it makes sense Hollow Knight is $15, but that doesn’t mean that Dread has to be $60. It could easily be $40. Unless you think Nintendo spent the same amount of money on Dread that they did on Mario Odyssey, or Breath of the Wild. Hell, I think they probably spent more on Kirby Star Allies, quite frankly.
The argument, “Metroid Dread should cost $60 because it cost more than an indie game” only makes sense if you look at game budgets with some kind of weird arbitrary formula, where any indie game should be $40, and triple A game should be $60, and anything less than $40 is “undervalued.” No, it’s more complex than that, and saying Hollow Knight is “undervalued” brings up the question of “undervalued by whom.” The consumer got what they wanted in most cases, and the developer got a huge success. It seems like a person arguing this game is “undervalued” is saying that it’s a crime Team Cherry are merely making millions of dollars.
This is the thing though. Companies like Nintendo are huge, and greedy, and they care more about being able to bilk you for $60 for every game they make then a franchise like Metroid. Pricing Dread at this price insures Metroid remains a niche property, and if it fails to hit 2 million, it will likely effect the likelihood that the franchise will continue with a sixth game any time soon.
