The prices for digital and physical Nintendo games are going to start being different very soon. Announced in a very short blog post, the company announced that starting with Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which releases in May, physical game cartridges will be slightly more expensive than downloading the game on the eShop.
Nintendo Physical Games are Becoming More Expensive
As noted above, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book will be the first game that sees the difference between its digital and physical price. While the digital page shows the standard price of $59.99, the physical pre-order is now set to $69.99.
In the news post, Nintendo says that the change in prices is reflective of “the different costs associated with producing and distributing” games. This is a move that is being expanded in all regions, not just the United States, so tariffs could potentially be a part of this reasoning, but it doesn’t seem to be the whole story here. It wasn’t said if $10 will always be the tax for buying physical, but Nintendo did mention that outside retailers can set their own prices, so there may be some that keep their price in line with digital releases, but we wouldn’t say that is likely.
The upcoming price change is in effect for all upcoming and new releases from Nintendo. This has not affected the price of already released games like Mario Kart World or Donkey Kong Bananza.
This is just the latest step Nintendo (and video games in general) is making towards pushing players to go fully digital with their libraries. Of course, many Nintendo fans are going to be familiar with the game-key cards for Nintendo Switch 2, but those have largely been relegated to third-party games outside of Pokémon Pokopia.
Hopefully, this price change will prevent more future first-party games from going the game-key card route. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see some third-party games start announcing price differences in a very similar fashion when it comes to the Switch 2.
