Mario Kart World
Mario Kart World is the Nintendo Switch 2’s biggest launch game, and it brings with it an eye-opening shake-up to Nintendo’s game pricing.
A physical cartridge for Mario Kart World will set you back £74.99, £15 more than a somewhat recent flagship title like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It sold for £59.99 at launch in 2023.
The jump in cost is even bigger in Europe. A physical edition of Mario Kart World costs €89.99, up from €69.99 for Tears of the Kingdom.
Digital editions of games will be a little cheaper, though. Mario Kart World costs £66.99 from the Nintendo eShop, £8 less than the cartridge.
In the last generation, you’d typically pay the same amount for digital and physical editions of games. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is currently listed as £49.99.
Is buying digital the way forward? Not necessarily. First-party Nintendo titles are renowned for holding their value. And these days, you don’t even have to pay any fees to sell your done-and-dusted Switch 2 games on eBay.
Can you be bothered to contend with the faff, the chancers and scammers? That’s another question.
Switch 2 goes big on digital
Nintendo’s push towards digital game purchases is something Microsoft and Sony have been promoting for many years. And it’s supported by a new way to share digital game that, according to Nintendo at least, will make it feel more like sharing a physical cartridge.
You’ll be able to transfer Nintendo Switch 2 games between two consoles, and lend them for a two-week stint to other Switch consoles in your “family group”. One of those family groups can have up to eight consoles in it, including yours.
Some physical game cartridges won’t even include the actual game data either. Game-Key Cards are physical cartridges, but will actually just prompt the console to download the data rather than actually containing it on the cartridge. This will make fiscal sense for cheaper games, as the Switch 2 cartridges use fairly fast memory that may not be that cheap to implement. But it’s bad news for game preservation.
This price jump also raises again the question of how high game prices may go when GTA 6 arrives — fingers crossed — later this year. The repeated headline you may have seen over previous months is the game could cost $100, which could equate to £89.99 in the UK.
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Actual pricing of games these days is more complex than casual players might appreciate, though. PlayStation, Xbox and PC titles are often already sold at, or above, £100 thanks to deluxe or special editions of titles that include bits of DLC fluff or — on Xbox and PC — a few days of early access.