One of the more contentious decisions made by Nintendo regarding the upcoming release of the Switch on March 3 was the choice to sell the console without a game packed into the box.
1-2-Switch, which we've previewed here, is the obvious candidate, as it's a collection of mini-games that showcase the various features included in the Joy-Con controllers. Nintendo, however, opted not to include that game nor any other, suggesting that doing so would have caused them to increase the cost of the console. Instead Nintendo of America's Reggie Fils-Aime has explained that they want players to chose their own game, while keeping the hardware as competitively priced as they can.
"We look at every launch uniquely as to what's the right thing to do for that launch," Fils-Aime said in an interview with GameSpot. "And I've been involved in launches dating back to the Nintendo DS. Each one is a little different. For this launch, what we found is that with the range of software that's coming - not only available day one but through April and into the summer, and including the holiday timeframe with Super Mario Odyssey - that we wanted to enable the consumer to buy the software they want, to look to get to the most approachable price point we could get to. That led us to a $299 price point, and let the consumer decide what games they want to buy."
Fils-Aime then added later: "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."
In the UK the Switch is set to retail at £280 (in Europe the price is going to vary between different territories), but as we now know, to play anything on the handheld-console hybrid at launch will require an additional investment on top of that. The question is, will this extra expense be enough to put off some players from investing on day one?