According to Nintendo of America’s boss man Reggie Fils-Aime, the Nintendo Switch isn’t bundled with a game, because… “it really needed to be at $299.”
Clearly, there are more details than that, but it definitely was an odd choice for those of us waiting in line to place preorders last week. Both previous consoles, Wii and Wii U, were bundled with an introductory title, so we’d assumed from the presentation that 1-2-Switch would be in the package this time around as well—the perfect game to show off the console’s abilities.
Here’s the greater breakdown that Reggie offered up to GameSpot, also commenting on how 1-2-Switch isn’t the same deal as Wii Sports or NintendoLand, since it offers a “wider pallet of experiences”:
“The first decision that we make is, where do we want to be in terms of the hardware price point that’s going to be approachable and hit the marketplace we want? And from a US price point, we wanted to be at $299. Certainly, lower is always better, but at a $349 or $399 price point, we just didn’t feel that was the right place to be. So we start there.
And then it’s all about, what’s going to be included? Obviously the inclusion of the two Joy-Con, critically important; all the right cables, the dock, critically important. We also have to do this from a financial perspective as well. Once we got to that bundle, it really needed to be at $299 without a piece of software.
I would say, though, that 1-2-Switch has many more experiences. It’s a wider pallet of experiences, potentially more akin to Wii Play than to Wii Sports. And, again, from that standpoint, Wii Play was a standalone piece of software both with a controller at the time and without, so that’s probably the better analogy.”
This will certainly continue to be a point of debate among those who’ve experienced Nintendo console launches before… did they make the right call in not pre-installing 1-2-Switch on these new machines? We’re still scratching our heads and hoping that Nintendo hasn’t harmed the console or the game’s chance of success with this decision. Stay tuned as more details (and reasoning, surely) come to light from the company.
