Tariffs Are Part Of It, But Let's Not Kid Ourselves. The Virtual Boy Pricing Is Mostly Nintendo Pulling A Nintendo

Let's Talk About Why This New Virtual Boy Is Nintendo Pulling A Nintendo

Where do I even start with this?

Nintendo's September 2025 Direct felt different than the previous ones. It's not that I haven't felt uneasy as Nintendo looms closer towards a video game hardware monopoly before. It's more than that; once the party streamers and confetti fell, this event felt like Nintendo was really reveling in its current vice-grip on console hardware and then some. What other explanation is there for them charging $20 for a singular island in Donkey Kong Bananza, $70 for an emulated version of Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, and a new Virtua Boy priced at a whopping $100? And do I need to remind you of how ridiculous it is that these game carts are inching towards $70 per pop across the board? Screw that! It sucks, and it's okay to say it sucks!

Nevertheless, it's not that morons run Nintendo or that they are careening towards a financial catastrophe; the reality is much more depressing: they don't care. They don't care about pricing; they don't need to care; they know they don't need to care. It doesn't hurt to say that, and it needs to be said, and for those who have been following them for more than a few years, you shouldn't be too surprised. Nintendo has consistently beaten to the tune of its own drum for over thirty years. Why expect them to change course now? The difference is that the console landscape has changed so dramatically, and the competition is so scarce, that it hurts more this time.

In prior eras, something like Nintendo selling a new Virtua Boy set at $100 and a cardboard insert at $25 would be branded as "Nintendo Pulling A Nintendo," and we'd all move on with our lives and forget the whole thing even happened. Nintendo has sold us stupider pieces of plastic garbage for exorbitantly higher prices before. I know there's an e-Reader in my parents' storage closet with a bunch of scannable cards; I know it. But those dumb trinkets and gizmos never felt attached to the company's overall identity or its whole approach to its gaming investments. Sure, the GameCube's internet adapter had only four games that supported it, thus making it almost a complete waste of money. Still, it wasn't part of a company-wide initiative that felt like it was pricing people out of the gaming hobby. This new Virtua Boy, on the other hand, does feel that way, and that's what makes it such a deplorable cherry on top of Nintendo's burgeoning shit sundae. First, you screwed people over with the game carts, then you shit-canned the voucher program, then you throttled back upgrade discounts for Switch 2 remasters/remakes of Switch 1 games, and now you're charging $100 for the Virtua Boy remake? Are you shitting me? How much more blood do you want from me?

$25 for a cardboard insert sure is something!

Besides the game carts, most of the items on my list are minor contrivances in the grand scheme of things, but they're part of a growing laundry list of things Nintendo is doing to basically capitalize on the fact that they don't need to play ball anymore. Who's stopping them? Consumers have already bought enough Switch 2s to make it a healthy ecosystem, and Microsoft isn't going to cease tripping over rakes any time soon. Behind the scenes, Sony is becoming increasingly more reliant on their console division as their consumer technology and entertainment divisions lag, and several of the significant gaming investments it made over the past ten years have blown up in its face. So, seriously, look at this Virtua Boy nonsense. You can blame tariffs all you want, but there's no denying that at least half of what they are doing with this thing is on Nintendo and not the Trump Administration. We can debate how much reciprocal tariffs impacted the price all we want. Nevertheless, none of that affected Nintendo's decision to hard-lock the device to require it to be online at all times and for users to have a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership for it to function correctly. Which means when Nintendo suspends this service, this Virtua Boy is goddamn useless. Conversely, if you forget to re-up your subscription, you could lose your entire library on the thing at the drop of a hat. And $25 for a cardboard insert, which should be included in the package? When did Nintendo become Apple in trying to bilk every penny or farthing out of their die-hard loyalists? All of this doesn't smell of reciprocal tariffs; it reeks of Nintendo making it harder for us to enjoy our hobby.

Yes, tariffs have impacted gaming. Like most, when Nintendo announced that Switch 2 console prices would remain as announced, but controllers and accessories would spike, I was absolutely willing to shift the blame to reciprocal tariffs. When Nintendo announced that new amiibo pricing would be bumped up by $10, I was slightly uneasy, but still willing to shift most of the blame to tariffs as well. It was around the time when Nintendo announced that the price of the original Switch and its OLED variant would be jumping up when things started to disconnect for me. Sure, that decision coincided with the Trump Administration opting to enter into a trade war with Japan, one of our strongest and most reliable East Asian trade partners; however, this was still the third blow from them. I remember when the expectation on older hardware was that the price of it would drop when a successor console had launched. Nintendo is still selling OG Switch consoles, but if they're worried about tariffs, they could always sell their remaining stock and then shift manufacturing to the Switch 2. They don't need to squeeze belated consumers like this. And yet, they are. And that's just one reason why it doesn't feel good or the same as before to watch Nintendo take its victory lap.

It's Not Like Everything Else From September's Direct Was Any Different

I guess if you want to punch stuff as Donkey Kong again, this might be worth the $20 price tag.

The Virtua Boy wasn't the only thing that irked me during Nintendo's September 2025 Direct. I bought and gave it a whirl and can confirm that DK Island and Emerald Rush are a singular new environment and change, at best. While the DLC introduces some new characters and mechanics to take advantage of the new environment, the fact that it is priced at $20 is downright insulting. Emerald Rush is almost an official "Bingo mode" and gets challenging fairly quickly, but it is NOT a Balloon World equivalent, so it reeks of something that should have been $10 DLC. And be honest, can tariffs be used to justify a $10 jump on what feels like fairly standard post-release DLC? No. They aren't releasing this physically, and it never once felt like the Bananza Team was pushing the envelope with their development time or resources. But hey, if you want a weird permutation of Salmon Run with Donkey Kong, maybe you can get some value out of it, and considering that Nintendo DLC rarely goes on sale, what difference does it make if you buy it now or two years after the fact? As I said before, the voucher program from the OG Switch is dead. Without a replacement in the immediate future, Nintendo is putting in zero effort to make anything released on their consoles affordable anymore. They threw a few bones during the Switch 2's launch here and there, but now that they feel like they won the war on game carts, it's as if they are kicking back as they initiate the anti-consumer policies they wanted to employ from the onset.

But the announcement that really chuffed me to bits was the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 nonsense. The combo pack got top billing during the September Direct, and while I was excited at first, my enthusiasm came crashing down once I learned Nintendo was pricing the whole package at $70. Worse, those who had purchased Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which had an emulated version of Galaxy 1, wouldn't be getting a discount. If you did buy Super Mario 3D All-Stars and want to play this new combo pack, you're spending $70 to get an okay running version of Galaxy 2 on Switch 2. What a deal. There's no on-ramp for the handful of us that still have 3D All-Stars, which is still impossible to purchase legally today, by the way! Would it kill Nintendo to simply bring Super Mario 3D All-Stars out from the dreaded "Nintendo Vault" and sell Galaxy 2 piecemeal at a discount? No, but can you honestly imagine Nintendo doing anything different than what they are doing right now? Nintendo has its Nintendo Switch 2 Edition program, wherein owners of an original game can purchase additional content as DLC through an upgrade pack. They're doing that with the Switch 2 release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but not with the re-release of Super Mario Galaxy 2. Why? Because Nintendo knows they don't need to follow their own rules.

$70, huh?!

But hey, Galaxy 2 is an undeniably "bigger" game compared to Galaxy 1. A bigger game is going to translate into a higher price due to development costs, right? To a fair degree, that's true, but Nintendo has been trying to squeak by with performative acts of "value" as prices jump up. The Kirby Air Riders Amiibos are the largest Amiibos the company has ever made, but they're $50, and by making the figures a few centimeters larger, you can't help but think that they have settled on that price moving forward. Everything Nintendo is doing is pushing the boundaries of price. Yes, international prices for these Amiibos have remained relatively stable. The Air Riders Amiibos and Virtual Boy accessories are less expensive in Canada, where there are no tariffs. Yes, in the world of toys, especially figurines, it's essential not to pretend the tariffs don't exist and that they aren't having an impact on North American consumers. Every fanbase that buys any portion of their collection or hobby through importation has a right to be mad, and the gaming hobby has been relatively consistent in talking about the impacts of tariffs on their hobby, along with the board game community. However, let's not act like Amiibos weren't already overpriced, and jumping up their asking price by more than a few dollars feels like a hungry business person pouncing on tariffs as an excuse to readjust pricing to where they REALLY wanted them to be years ago.

Again, the toy industry has been about as vocal as possible about tariffs hurting their bottom line right from the rip, so the Amiibo price increases should offer Nintendo some moral padding in the debate about tariffs guiding their current business operations. And yet, it doesn't. Mind you, this is the same company that has gloated at their ability to lock the hosts of ROM sharing websites from their full wages for practically their entire life. This is also a company that has a new non-OLED dockable console, still priced on average $50 to $100 more than its MSRP price point in the USA, in almost all of the UK and EU. Trump's reciprocal tariffs can only go so far in explaining why Nintendo expects Canadian and almost all European markets to pay disproportionately more to continue gaming in their homes. It's always been that way, but with a lack of console hardware competition, it hurts so much more this time around. I want to call the Air Riders Amiibo price jump poor optics, but honestly, who is holding Nintendo accountable these days? Could you even pull off some modicum of accountability even if you wanted to try?

The Nintendo Defense Force Is Back, And That Blows Chunks

It really feels like we lost the war against Nintendo's otherwise spiteful Game Cart initiative.

This topic came up during Jeff Gerstmann's podcast, but it bears repeating during this discussion. The Nintendo Defense Force, Nintendo's most fervent and blind members of their fanbase, is back. In a story relayed by Gerstmann during that podcast, he discusses an interview with French developers from the 90s who were closely tied to some foundational games in the industry. Both of the interview subjects indicated that their start in games came from Sega-made consoles, be it the Master System or the Mega Drive. Instead of accepting the fact that Nintendo hardware didn't have the best distribution outside of Japan and North America, a well-established and known FACT, the Nintendo Defense Force decided to come out in force, being completely belligerent that the subjects of the interview were wrong, lying, or expressing an anti-Nintendo agenda. The idea that anyone would doubt the fact that Sega and Sony had a vice-grip on the European markets for literal decades is absurd, but here we are. This hobby, like most, always had issues with revisionist history and console war-based illogic. Still, the post-truth world has made this so much worse, and Nintendo, knowing they can essentially take a victory lap half-assed, has inadvertently summoned the worst of the worst.

Mario Kart World might pose some positive value proposition to those die-hard fans and even those in the general gaming audience at its unprecedented $79.99 price point. Make no doubt about it, the game is good and endlessly charming. But vocally defending Nintendo lurching the industry towards $79.99 being the "new normal?" I don't fuck with that, and neither should you. This move is pricing out whole swaths of people from this hobby, and it sucks, and blaming inflation only should go so far. We've been hearing about how game budgets have ballooned over the years since the OG Switch, Xbox Series S/X, and PS5 first dropped, but I will maintain that, for the most part, that's not a burden we should carry in full. It's on the larger game studios to allocate game budgets, plan development time, and guide development in ways that don't get out of control. You and I aren't the ones who told the industry that every game needed to be open-world with hand-crafted environments that take a minimum of four to five years to make. We have praised and gobbled up dozens, if not hundreds, of games that have broken the Breath of the Wild open-world mold, and Nintendo of all companies should know that. So, sure, it's charming to see Mario, Peach, or a random Goomba rock back and forth in their kart while they idle on the screen. Did they need to include that AND an open-world hub, which usually has more empty space than is required for a game of this type? No, so I don't want Nintendo passing the buck on me or anyone else.

$50 for an Amiibo still feels like robbery.

And you know what? To anyone still feeling like they have an obligation to defend a multi-billion dollar company that has proven time and time again that they don't give a shit about your feelings and actively hate the retro gaming community, go ahead and get suckered. Buy the new Virtua Boy and watch it become the latest plastic-based dust collector on your shelf of useless trinkets that only saw support for a maximum of one year and change, along with the e-Reader or GameCube internet adapter. I'm not calling for you to be publicly flogged, but if you're actually going to spend $100 for the Virtua Boy unit along with another questionably emulated Wii classic for $70, know you're wallowing in slop. Corporate-made and business-led slop meant to convince you that everything is good and dandy and all of this is going to work and be perfect three years from now. To the rest of you, increasingly, it seems like the "Old Guard" is on the way out and a new brutal anti-consumer era is here. I know I should not act like things were ever that much better in the past or in the first place; I get that. Nintendo has always hated anyone who doesn't want to live in the "now" or asks questions about their business policies. Ask the fighting game community, ask the dozens of emulator sites or ROM hosting services that have had their lives ruined, ask anyone who wants basic game preservation about their real feelings about Nintendo. You might like or love Mario or even the games attached to your Nintendo-branded hardware, but you have to accept that the company that makes that hardware doesn't give a SHIT about you. They don't.

Most people accept that the corporate leadership of EA is anti-consumer and doesn't respect the hobby; most people also accept that the corporate leadership of Roblox is anti-consumer and doesn't respect the hobby. We all agree at this point that the CEO of Microsoft is anti-consumer and doesn't respect the hobby. So, it's time to normalize saying that the corporate leadership at Nintendo is anti-consumer and doesn't respect the hobby. I appreciate and admire the people who make the phenomenal gaming titles that come out of the big red house, but that doesn't mean I would EVER kiss the feet of the people who make the decisions on how to run the business. That's utterly ridiculous.