@sixrings also Canadian, also paying the insane costs… that said, 95% of the games I buy I buy on STEEP discounts using Deku Deals (or actually, now that the Switch 2 is out and the eShop has gotten a bit of an upgrade, the actual eShop wishlist does what Deku Deals always did for me), so I’m not overly upset by the one MAYBE two first party Nintendo games I have to buy at full price in a year – and even those I will sometimes wait for the 33% discount or w/e it is.
The fact of the matter is videogames just havn’t gone up with inflation like everything else has, and they are worth more (atleast the VERY few that are actually complete and polished upon release, which atleast Nintendo first-party games tend to be) than we are paying for them – its as simple as that. Mobile gaming and the race-to-the-pricing-bottom completely devalued games for an entire generation of gamers, and so now we’re left with an industry rife with unfinished, untested, messes of games on release that tout “road maps” for **CONTENT** (aka. Them finishing their game after you’ve bought it) and microtransaction slop to extract every dime out of you they can after their initial “low price” to try to recoup costs… and yet even still dev teams are being closed constantly and games cancelled… its not sustainable.
So again, I’ll happily pay for 1 or 2 full price Nintendo games in a year – some of the only games that I can count on actually being finished and polished these days, because they actually know their worth and expect to get what they are worth for them – and then continue to get others on sales or just keep chipping away at a backlog that I’ll never finish.
Fwiw, my two kids got YEARS of entertainment out of Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Neither ever beat it till now, but they threw it on regularly to play a level or two with eachother or friends, and then when I was playing it after the update, both wanted to join in with me and help me beat some of the harder endgame and postgame bosses and play all the new levels with me. So I would say both myself and my kids have gotten our money’s worth out of the base game and upgrade.