Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom May Signal Controversial Nintendo Price Hike
We hope you've been saving your rupees because it looks like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom could cost you a pretty penny. The upcoming game's price has just leaked, and safe to say, you aren't going to be happy.
As a sequel to 2017's Breath of the Wild, the next chapter in the Zelda lineage has a lot to live up to. Still, it's poised to smash Nintendo's profit projections - just like its predecessor. That's pretty much a given, thanks to a beefy price hike.
How Much Will Tears Of The Kingdom Cost?
The debate around the $70 video game is one that rages across the industry, with a blasé Jim Ryan saying this is what we should expect for new-gen games. The problem is, Tears of the Kingdom is a new-gen game running on a console we can't exactly say is new-gen.
As $70 becomes the standard for PS5 and Xbox Series titles, Nintendo could join the trend with Tears of the Kingdom. A listing on the Nintendo Canada site updated Tears of the Kingdom as $89.99 CAD. The US site also had it down at $69.99, meaning it'll likely be £69.99 in the UK.
Throwing fuel on the fire, these prices have now been deleted, suggesting that someone at Nintendo set them live before they were meant to. If this wasn't enough, sites including Amazon, Best Buy, and GameStop have updated their prices and stopped taking pre-orders.
Is Nintendo Joining The $70 club?
Tears of the Kindom hitting $70 is a $10 jump from what Breath of the Wild goes for digitally. Nintendo is notoriously stringent with its pricing, meaning even five years after it launched, BotW still sits at the $60/£60 mark.
It's true that the industry has come a long way in that time - and that Tears of the Kingdom should be a technically superior model - but as there are worries the Switch won't be able to handle it, we have to ask whether we should be paying more to play on a console that's entering its twilight years.
If Nintendo is setting a new precedent, there are worries other major franchises like Mario and Pokemon could follow suit. There have already been grumbles that we're playing these prices for AAA new-gen releases like God of War Ragnarok, so the rage is out in force.
When Centro Leaks shared the news, one angry Pokefan fumed, "I KNEW this was inevitably coming. The Switch isn't anywhere close to the other consoles, they shouldn’t have the audacity to be doing this."
Sadly, those rumours of a Switch Pro/Switch 2 never came to pass, so unless Nintendo is planning on dropping a surprise for the ages at the February 8 Direct, we're stuck playing Tears of the Kindom on the OG Switch... and paying a princely sum for it.
