Author Topic: Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack To Also Include Otherwise Paid DLC Beginning With AC: New Horizons Pack  (Read 4510 times)

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Offline Shaymin

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...this might be cliche, but now how much would you pay?

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/58670/nintendo-switch-online-expansion-pack-to-also-include-otherwise-paid-dlc-beginning-with-ac-new-horizons-pack

It's not just going to be WinBack and M.U.S.H.A. in the Expansion Pack for Nintendo Switch Online.

During the Animal Crossing: New Horizons presentation, it was announced that the Expansion Pack would grant access to the "Happy Home Paradise" DLC. This would be included along with the previously announced Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis libraries.

The pricing for the Expansion Pack with included Nintendo Switch Online was also revealed to be $49.99 US for an individual plan or $79.99 for a family plan, and it will be available October 25. No other information was provided for other DLC offers.

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Offline broodwars

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Yeah no. I'm not paying an extra $30 a year for a bunch of random N64 & Genesis ROMs for games I probably already own.
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Offline Kairon

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I wonder how much the Animal Crossing DLC will cost standalone.

EDIT: OMG Happy Home Paradise costs $24.99 STANDALONE?!?!?!? That's ALMOST the price of the ENTIRE YEAR of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pak upgrade!!!

On subsequent examination Nintendo is obviously sacrificing the Animal Crossing DLC as a price anchor to make the Online Subscription seem like a steal.
« Last Edit: October 15, 2021, 11:32:28 AM by Kairon »
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Offline Kairon

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Yeah no. I'm not paying an extra $30 a year for a bunch of random N64 & Genesis ROMs for games I probably already own.

If there are enough people like you (and fewer people like me) I hope that either puts a negative price pressure on this product when Nintendo revisits it (probably in a year's time when everyone will be thinking about up/down-grading) or encourages them to add in more and better features for the Expansion Pak.

However, the family plan is still an absolutely amazing deal. I've got 5 people on mine so if we all shared the cost that comes to only $16 a year for each of us for everything listed.
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Offline pokepal148

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As someone who doesn't own many N64 games, this is still not a bad deal.

Offline Enner

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The balls on this fucking company sometimes. Jeez....

Offline Mop it up

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Offline Mythtendo

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The balls on this fucking company sometimes. Jeez....

Yeah, because $4 a month for online service and hundreds of free games to play is a terrible deal.  :rolleyes:

Offline broodwars

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The balls on this fucking company sometimes. Jeez....

Yeah, because $4 a month for online service and hundreds of free games to play is a terrible deal.  :rolleyes:

"Hundreds", huh? Citation needed. Thankfully, I can provide one: there are 144 games on the service as of this summer.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_Online_games

Now, to address your point: by comparison, Sony charges $5 a month for online service that actually works (yes, I have issues with PSN's quality, too, but it's still in far better shape and is more fully-featured than NSO) and offers 3 games each month that were actually made this decade if they are not completely new altogether. Microsoft charges a similar price for a similar benefit.

Welcome to the big leagues. Nintendo got away with having a historically shitty online service because they only charged either $0 or $20 for the privilege of using it. Now that they want $50 for it, they have to prove it's worth the cost. A handful of N64 and Genesis ROMs most people can get for free and emulate on their potato of a computer these days doesn't cut it. If Nintendo wants people to pay them more money, then they need to make a service worthy of being paid more money.
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Offline nickmitch

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Has Nintendo confirmed if other paid DLC would be coming to NSO?  The video made it sound like Animal Crossing was specifically included in the "+ Expansion Pack".

My biggest issue with that, even if they do include future DLC, is that I don't think Nintendo does nearly enough to DLC to justify the extra $30.  I'd imagine Smash Bros would be exempt because of 3rd Party licensing issues, and Pokemon would be exempt because it's Pokemon.  That doesn't leave a lot of titles that Nintendo puts out paid DLC for.  On Switch, there's been BotW, Luigi's Mansion 3, Splatoon 2, FE Three Houses, and Age of Calamity.  I may be forgetting some things but for that money, I wouldn't really feel like I'm getting my money's worth unless there was DLC for a game I was particularly interested in. 
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Offline broodwars

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Has Nintendo confirmed if other paid DLC would be coming to NSO?  The video made it sound like Animal Crossing was specifically included in the "+ Expansion Pack".

My biggest issue with that, even if they do include future DLC, is that I don't think Nintendo does nearly enough to DLC to justify the extra $30.  I'd imagine Smash Bros would be exempt because of 3rd Party licensing issues, and Pokemon would be exempt because it's Pokemon.  That doesn't leave a lot of titles that Nintendo puts out paid DLC for.  On Switch, there's been BotW, Luigi's Mansion 3, Splatoon 2, FE Three Houses, and Age of Calamity.  I may be forgetting some things but for that money, I wouldn't really feel like I'm getting my money's worth unless there was DLC for a game I was particularly interested in.

You forgot Xenoblade 2 (though in that case, you're pretty much buying an entire other game with that expansion DLC), but yeah. I have absolutely no interest in Animal Crossing, so that "expansion" DLC is completely worthless to me.
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Offline nickmitch

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Has Nintendo confirmed if other paid DLC would be coming to NSO?  The video made it sound like Animal Crossing was specifically included in the "+ Expansion Pack".

My biggest issue with that, even if they do include future DLC, is that I don't think Nintendo does nearly enough to DLC to justify the extra $30.  I'd imagine Smash Bros would be exempt because of 3rd Party licensing issues, and Pokemon would be exempt because it's Pokemon.  That doesn't leave a lot of titles that Nintendo puts out paid DLC for.  On Switch, there's been BotW, Luigi's Mansion 3, Splatoon 2, FE Three Houses, and Age of Calamity.  I may be forgetting some things but for that money, I wouldn't really feel like I'm getting my money's worth unless there was DLC for a game I was particularly interested in.

You forgot Xenoblade 2 (though in that case, you're pretty much buying an entire other game with that expansion DLC), but yeah. I have absolutely no interest in Animal Crossing, so that "expansion" DLC is completely worthless to me.

You're right! I had a feeling I was missing a big one.  I do wonder if they'd include something like that since they sold it as a standalone game. 

I'm not really interested in the AC DLC either, so it's a tough sell for the remaining two pieces to this.
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Offline BeautifulShy

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Pure bonkers.

I guess you are not getting the family plan upgrade then...
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Offline Enner

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The balls on this fucking company sometimes. Jeez....

Yeah, because $4 a month for online service and hundreds of free games to play is a terrible deal.  :rolleyes:

Heh.

Honestly, I'll be one of the first to proclaim the base NSO is fine. This is probably due to my major online multiplayer experiences being Splatoon 2, Tetris 99, and Monster Hunter Rise. All those games worked well online, though I did have my small share of latency spikes and disconnects in Splatoon 2. I don't talk much at all, so the utter lack of communication and social features built in to the system and the service is something I shrug off.

I'll throw a tea-table-flipping argument in favor to Nintendo on this: Maybe the $50 individual/$80 family pricing is the fair and profitable price for Nintendo's efforts. Meaning however Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Sony are charging for their subscription services, they are loss leaders. Of course, neither Microsoft or Sony are sweating since they are in for a long-haul user-acquisition mode and/or have other revenue sources. Nintendo is a smaller company, so whatever (bad) licensing deals they made they intend to profit off of immediately. Of course, since we the public will never be privy to the numbers, we won't know what's exactly what.

Compared to all other manner of video game stuff I can throw my money at, NSO+XP just looks like a bad deal for me at the moment. I don't go to old games that often and I'm not sure if I want the Happy Home Designer sequel-as-an-expansion for Animal Crossing New Horizons. I guess this is a weird feeling, but I wouldn't mind giving Nintendo subscription money. However, I'm disappointed that they made such a poor initial offering. Maybe in due time, this will be an easy way to get all the expansions to Nintendo games. Maybe the old game offerings will get some games that are too curious to pass up. Maybe Nintendo can layoff being so greedy and let you keep the expansion DLC for full-priced games once your annual subscription lapses. As far as I can see at the moment, the deal is not appealing.

Offline Luigi Dude

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The fact they're jumping the price up to $50 a year pretty much guarantees Gamecube games and Wii games will be hitting the service in the future since we know Nintendo has a working emulator for those systems.  The only problem is they should have games from those systems ready at launch to justify the price increase at this time.

It's kind of like how the $20 for NSO at launch when it only had 20 NES titles wasn't that great a value, but when you fast forward a year and they now added 20 SNES titles, along with all the NES titles they got put in since the launch of the system, suddenly that $20 was a great deal compared to what you were getting.

Right now I want to see how active they'll be with this new expansion.  One of the reasons why you had such a slow drip on the base service is because of how cheap it was.  With Nintendo charging a good deal more, I'd like to imagine they'll be more proactive with how many games hit the service, since they have way more of a reason to sell this.  People have to remember the base plan is required just to play online games, while the expansion is purely optional.  The base plan got the bare minimum because it was something you kind of needed to buy anyway, while this new plan is something Nintendo has to make more appealing to get people to buy.
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Offline pokepal148

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The fact that you're primarily getting more retro games with the service shows that Nintendo sees this service as a subscription service for retro games primarily and that's fine and dandy but they don't support it well enough for it to succeed on that front so there seems to be some kind of disconnect between what we see the service as and what they see it as.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2021, 11:13:08 AM by pokepal148 »

Offline Mop it up

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If they plan to add things like more systems or DLC in the future then I think they should be more forthcoming about their plans. As it sits, it doesn't seem like a good value.

Offline Kairon

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It'll be interesting to see Nintendo revisit this in a year. By then they'll have data on exactly how many people took the Expansion Pak upgrade and, IF people vote with their wallets against this product offering, Nintendo will be strongly pressured to either improve the value proposition (adding more systems, games, or features to the expansion pak) or lower the price.

I think Nintendo DOES want to hit a $50-60 annual price for this to bulk up on recurring subscription income (the best kind of income! yummy!), so I think if it came to that they'd be compelled to try to sweeten the pot instead of lowering the price: add the GB and GBA systems, flesh out the game libraries of existing systems as much as they can, throw in MULTIPLE free DLC packs (imagine, for example, if there was a Smash Fighter's Pass Volume 3 and that was promised! Or a Mario Kart 9 DLC?), or come up with some other additive features, like Pokemon Box, Mobile Game bonuses, Better Gold Points Cashback Bonuses, etc.
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Offline Adrock

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Per Emily Rogers, "Licensing costs are likely main culprit behind NSO expansion's bold price. I heard Sega were paid very, very well."

Nintendo possibly could have absorbed some of that, but not doing so is on-brand for the company. It won't unless the market forces it to (i.e. 3DS's LOL launch price). Not surprised, simply no less disappointing.

It's worth noting this is also the same Nintendo that locked digital purchases to four different systems (i.e. DSi, Wii, 3DS, and Wii U). The easiest thing to do would have been to dump the ROMs on the eShop and allow third parties to do the same while letting them set their own prices. However, Nintendo wants to make money on these games in perpetuity.

If they plan to add things like more systems or DLC in the future then I think they should be more forthcoming about their plans. As it sits, it doesn't seem like a good value.
It isn't and even if Nintendo was more forthcoming, the Expansion Pack still wouldn't be a good value at launch. There isn't even an incentive like Disney+ in which you can get special pricing for being an early adopter (albeit with a three year commitment).

Perhaps more troubling is the impression that not mentioning additional future perks sure sounds like peak LOL-Nintendo, the one that nickels and dimes customers because it normally gets away with it. Why include additional systems and whatnot when it can charge even more money for it?

Offline Mop it up

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Per Emily Rogers, "Licensing costs are likely main culprit behind NSO expansion's bold price. I heard Sega were paid very, very well."
If this is indeed true, it makes me wonder even more why Nintendo chose to offer Genesis games (many which are already widely available) instead of another one of their own systems like Game Boy.

Offline pokepal148

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I mean Genesis games seem to get around in general. I can't imagine they were a big contributor to the cost if freaking atgames had access to them for as long as they did.

Offline M.K.Ultra

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I have a question. Suppose I get the expansion pack for a year and then let it lapse. Do I still have access to the AC DLC?

Offline Khushrenada

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I have a question. Suppose I get the expansion pack for a year and then let it lapse. Do I still have access to the AC DLC?

This was the answer that was being sourced last Friday. To my knowledge, it is still correct.

https://twitter.com/laurakbuzz/status/1449046044386463751?s=21
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