10 Crucial Things The Nintendo Switch Must Do In Year One
4. Don't Rip Off Customers With Accessory Range/Pricing
A GameCube adapter for the Wii U? Brilliant, and likewise, the fresh design on the Super Smash Bros. controller. But then there's the custom Pokken Tournament controller, if you want to play it 'seriously', oh, and what about this golden Legend of Zelda racing wheel to play Mario Kart 8 DLC with a Wii Remote?
The latter is partly because the Wii U never really decided what type of console it wanted to be beyond the GamePad, but there were several holdover issues with retail pricing for older Wii accessories that were really awful.
No, Nintendo, I do not wish to pay £40 for a Wii Remote Plus, nor will I spend £15 per nunchuk. I also cannot justify £45 on the Wii U Pro Controller at this time, thanks, given that I already bought two Classic Controllers for the Wii.
The Nintendo Switch Pro controller should aim for £30-40, given that it's likely you won't get one inside the Switch retail box. If third-party dreams come true and we do get ports and remasters aplenty, they will likely need the Pro controller to support functionality akin to that on Xbox and PlayStation. There will also be gamers out there that prefer it to the Joy-Cons for sofa-based play.
This is a niggling problem that doesn’t only involve Nintendo. Pricing of accessories has always been an issue even since the days of £99 120GB hard drives for the Xbox 360. Manufacturers can make serious money by selling separate accessories for their consoles. Even now, the Dualshock 4 retails for £49.99 and the Xbox One standard controller retails for the same. The widely praised Xbox One Elite controller at £119.99 costs almost what a Nintendo GameCube system did in 2001(!).
Another holdover problem between the Wii and Wii U was the fact that the secondary controllers often involved having prior Wii accessories. That was fine considering the 101 million units sold with the Wii, but what wasn’t fine, was the fact that an upgraded controller design – the Wii Remote Plus – released in 2010 was then itself recycled for a new console in 2012, but kept the same retail price.
Given that we are being offered a chance to “Switch” around the controllers we use with Nintendo Switch, it had better be at a decent price.