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First-party Nintendo Switch games get rare price drops

By Tom Caswell August 5, 2020

Best Buy and Amazon are offering discounts on first-party Nintendo Switch titles, a rare event. Many games are up 17% off on both sites, bringing their prices to $50.

Here’s a list of games that are featured on both Amazon and Best Buy at that price.

Each site is also offering Octopath Traveler at a larger 25% discount, bringing that game’s price to $45. Best Buy has 17% off deals for Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s, Go Eevee!, Pokken Tournament, and Disgaea 4. Amazon has Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze exclusively at that discount as well.

2020 has been an interesting year for Nintendo. With gaming more popular than ever because of stay-at-home orders, the Switch has been out of stock at retailers for most of the year, inventory evaporating quickly the moment it’s replenished. That said, stock of consoles are currently more plentiful than a couple of months ago, the Lite version available more often than its dockable counterpart.

The last big first-party game from the company was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which became an instant phenomenon back in March, but currently, no new first-party game has a release date for the company. While Paper Mario: The Origami King was recently released, it was handled by third-party developer Intelligent Systems.

Nintendo seems to be banking on re-releases such as the recently announced Pikmin 3, originally a title on the Nintendo Wii U, to fill out its calendar. There are also rumors that a majority of the previous mainline Super Mario titles will be getting remasters celebrating the iconic plumber’s 35th anniversary.

Whatever the company’s plans are, it seems that the effects of the coronavirus have made it difficult to continue development on many titles, so there may not be a new first-party Nintendo game for some time. Now then might be the perfect time for players to pick up a Switch game they might have missed, especially as many of these titles rarely, if ever, go on sale.

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