Wesley Yin-Poole
Guest
Amid the ongoing backlash to Nintendo’s shock pricing for the Switch 2 and Mario Kart World, two former Nintendo PR managers have described the situation as “a true crisis moment for Nintendo.”
Speaking in a video on their YouTube channel, former Nintendo of America PR managers Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang criticized Nintendo for the way it revealed the $449.99 price of the Switch 2 and the $79.99 price of Mario Kart World.
“I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, but this does feel like a true crisis moment for Nintendo,” Ellis said.
Mario Kart World isn’t the only Nintendo Switch 2 game to cost $79.99. Some Nintendo Switch 2 Edition titles, such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, also cost $79.99.
Nintendo has even come under fire for charging for the Switch 2 tutorial video game experience, Welcome Tour, which fans have said should be a free pack-in. Astro's Playroom, for example, comes pre-installed on every PlayStation 5 console, serving additionally as a free tech demo for the DualSense controller.
Anger at the pricing has even spilled over into Nintendo’s Treehouse livestreams, which are overrun with viewers spamming “DROP THE PRICE” in the chat.
Ellis and Yang were particularly critical of the way Nintendo revealed the price of the Switch 2 and its games. They pointed to the lack of a price in the Direct itself as a "deliberate" omission that caused confusion and misinformation as fans scrambled to find out pricing confirmation elsewhere.
The Switch 2 and Mario Kart World pricing was “intentionally omitted from the Direct for a reason,” Yang claimed, “but handled poorly in terms of the information being in all these different places and you’re expecting the fans or the consumer to piece it all together.”
Ellis added: “It just shows some disrespect to the consumer, where, ‘oh, you just saw the Direct you’re so excited, you’re just gonna throw your money at us blindly, you’re not going to even ask the question of how much it cost because you’re so excited, aren’t you?’ "
“It’s a little bit degrading almost to the intelligence of the consumer,” Yang said.
The former NOA communications staff then went on to discuss Nintendo’s failure to address the pricing concern, either with a public statement or in interviews with the press. This, they said, was causing rampant speculation to fill the void with misinformation.
“They are enabling the story to get out of hand, out of control,” Yang said. “They have lost control of this,” Ellis added.
So what went wrong? Ellis and Yang suggested Nintendo now lacks the consumer mindfulness it once had, following former NOA boss Reggie Fils-Aimé’s retirement and the tragic loss of former Nintendo head Satoru Iwata.
Nintendo’s communications team will now be recommending the company release an official statement, Yang said, but the approval process will be painful, with many people involved before it even gets to current Nintendo boss Shuntaro Furukawa.
Nintendo will also be out of practice because it hasn’t spoken to its community or press in such a long time, the pair said, nor has it had to deal with this sort of negativity since the Nintendo 3DS price debacle of 2011.
Now there is concern for staff manning demo stations at the public-facing Switch 2 hands-on sessions. Fans will have reasonable questions at these public events and might put those to staff who are manning demo stations. If they respond with any sort of answer, that could end up online and framed as Nintendo’s official response.
What happens next? It remains to be seen, but neither Ellis nor Yang expect a price drop of either the Switch 2 or its games before launch.
For more, check out everything announced at the Switch 2 Nintendo Direct, and what the experts have to say about the Switch 2 price and Mario Kart World’s $80 price tag.
Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].