Penjualan Apresiasi Pelanggan Nintendo Gagal Upaya Gestur Goodwill

I love Nintendo. It was a formative part of my video game history, and to this day I think it makes some of the most consistently great games in the industry. But you know what I love more? Deals. For proof just look at my Steam backlog, which is full of games I stupidly bought on the basis of their being cheap. Do I have time to play this? No, but it was so cheap!

This is somewhat of a contradiction in my gaming tastes. Nintendo isn't known for offering sales. In fact, it's notoriously stingy with discounts, offering them rarely, and with only modest savings. So I was cautiously optimistic about the Customer Appreciation Sale, which Nintendo promoted as a larger scale sale than usual. The sale is now ongoing and, well, I should have trusted my instincts. These deals are not good. The sale prices are relegated primarily to older games, and while 30% is a larger discount than usual for Nintendo games on the eShop, it still barely makes a dent in the full list price.

Since Nintendo games keep their sticker price for years, this sale boasts discounts on years-old games like Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze and Mario Tennis Aces, both from 2018, for a lean $42. Those hoping that newer games would be included are likely left disappointed. A handful of 2025 releases are included--Metroid Prime 4, the Mario Galaxy two-pack, Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, and Donkey Kong Returns HD. Everything else is 2024 and before. So it's mostly older games, and most of the newest games are ports of older games. And in many cases these are the Switch 1 versions of games, meaning that if you want an optional Switch 2 upgrade, you have to make two purchases, and end up with less than a 30% discount as a result.

So the deals are unremarkable. But so what? I've gone this long without a copy of Astral Chain; I don't need to buy it now for $42. What makes this sale such an unforced error, though, is how Nintendo positioned the sale as innately tied to tariffs.

When President Trump came into office, he instituted a strict tariff regime on all kinds of imported goods from a wide range of countries. Lots of consumer goods manufacturers raised their prices in response, passing the cost onto the consumer. This all happened to coincide with the time that Nintendo was preparing to launch the Switch 2. Nintendo delayed US preorders to assess the impact of tariffs just after announcing its price--and while the price of the console itself didn't increase until just recently, the price of controllers, other accessories, and physical games did increase across the board.

You probably know the rest of the story. Many of Trump's tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court, roughly a year after he instituted them. The US government began issuing refunds to companies who had paid the import fees. Some companies like Playdate in turn offered tariff refunds to customers who bought their products at tariff-inflated prices. Consumers have also started to sue, saying they were impacted by the tariffs and if the companies are being refunded, it's only fair that the consumers who ate the costs get their money back. This does not appear to be going well so far, but in the long term, who knows. Nintendo, meanwhile, made strong profits.

It's in this environment that Nintendo announced its Customer Appreciation Sale, and in the process, it explicitly mentioned tariffs as a factor:

"The Customer Appreciation Sale is our way of saying thank you to Nintendo players for their continued support and is made possible in part by tariff-related refunds," the company said in its announcement. "While Nintendo absorbed most tariff-related costs, the refunds helped make promotions like this one possible."

And that is what makes this sale so galling. Tying the sale to tariffs, rhetorically or otherwise, was completely unnecessary. Nintendo likely doesn't owe us anything from a legal perspective. Sony and Microsoft have already argued as much in court and Nintendo has too. The gaming hardware manufacturers are united on this message. No one forced anyone to buy a Switch 2, its accessories, or any games. Those of us who have bought Nintendo products over the last year saw the price and decided it was worth it, regardless of whether that price was partly affected by Trump's tariffs.

What Nintendo has on its hands, instead, is a PR problem. Nintendo is getting a refund for whatever it paid in tariffs, which means that it's getting paid twice-over: once from consumers who bought their products at inflated prices, and again when the government pays it back for its import fees. That risks making consumers feel like they're getting a raw deal. Holding a big sale event and telling users it's made possible by the tariff refunds is meant to smooth over any bad feelings we as customers might have.

As many pointed out right away, this is already a silly proposition. Nintendo is thanking us by allowing us to give them more money. Even at sale prices, they're not going to take a loss. But an appropriately generous sale with much deeper discounts on older games, and including more recent games, would at least feel like we're getting some benefit out of the arrangement. Nintendo's traditionally very conservative sale prices could cut a little deeper, just this once, and we'd all leave feeling better about the whole tariff debacle. 

But the goodwill gesture goes from silly to downright insulting when the prices themselves are this mediocre. Instead of clearing any lingering resentments over the inflated price, we're left looking at this sale and saying: that's the best you can do? Instead of resolving the problem, it rubs salt in the wound. What's more, it's an unnecessary own-goal. Nintendo could have held the same sale, with the same prices, and never mentioned that it was intended as a make-good for tariffs, and many Nintendo fans wouldn't have noticed anything amiss.

There was a time in relatively recent history when Nintendo actually did feel its hand was forced to offer a big magnanimous gesture to soothe fans who felt burned. When the 3DS stumbled out of the gate, Nintendo quickly slashed the price in 2011. But sensing that those who bought it at the higher price might feel burned, it offered the 3DS Ambassador Program. This gave early adopters a special certificate with optional exclusive notifications, as well as 20 free games from the NES and GBA libraries that could be downloaded to the 3DS system. The GBA downloads remained exclusive to Ambassadors through the lifetime of the 3DS.

These situations are not perfectly comparable. The Switch 2 price has not been slashed and so early adopters haven't been left holding the bag. The price of a Switch 2 has already gone up, and if anything, it's more likely to increase further as global RAM prices remain unstable due to the advent of data centers. And a set of older emulated games would certainly be less appealing now that emulation is everywhere, and Nintendo offers a much larger library as part of the Switch Online subscription. But it's the type of outside-the-box thinking that we know Nintendo is capable of when its back is against the wall and it feels obligated to make things right for its loyal customers, who are often full-blown fans of the company and its franchises.

Compared to that, the Customer Appreciation Sale feels sadly lacking. This could have been an opportunity to smooth over a rocky moment for customers. Instead, it feels half-hearted and non-committal.