Super Mario RPG (Nintendo Switch) Expired

It's sold at least 4 million copies in barely six months, which I believe likely already makes it the third best-selling traditional turn-based JRPG on consoles the last decade, after Persona 5 and Dragon Quest XI (which are likely somewhere around 8 and 7 million copies, respectively). Note that P5 and DQXI are both multiplatform titles available on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC, and that both were later re-released as expanded versions (Persona 5 Royal and Dragon Quest XI S), and that their sales totals include all these different platforms and releases. The Super Mario RPG remake, on the other hand, exists as a single version available on just one platform. Then consider that the game's development cost was likely just a fraction of either of those other two, and I'm willing to bet that Nintendo is quite pleased with the game's commercial performance so far. Remember that traditional turn-based JRPGs are a rather niche genre in this day and age, and they aren't intended or expected to be challenging the likes of Call of Duty and Madden and NBA2K at the top of the annual sales charts. Nintendo knows this perfectly well, and they didn't set the scope, budget, or sales targets for this rather modest and very faithful remake of an old SNES game at a level so high where they would have needed it to come out and immediately outsell such huge genre hits as Persona and Dragon Quest and become the best-selling JRPG of the past decade just to break even, or anything even remotely like that.


Here's the thing, though: it's not actually dropping in MSRP here, technically. Go look the game up on Best Buy, Target, Gamestop, et cetera, or on the Nintendo eShop for that matter, and you'll see that it's still full price, sixty bucks. These $35 and $40 copies that we're seeing on Amazon and Walmart and Groupon are all from third-party marketplace sellers, who are buying up bulk quantities of the game from countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, where retail prices for videogames are generally much cheaper, and then importing and reselling them here in the US at a likely rather slim margin but in decently large quantities, to make a tidy little profit. Classic grey-market importing. Luckily for these resellers, Nintendo Switch cartridge games don't have any sort of regional lockout and will therefore work on any region's hardware, and the copies sold in those foreign regions still include English language options, so there aren't really any logistical roadblocks preventing them from being imported and resold in other regions this way. This is quite unlike the old days where, for instance, GameCube discs sold in Japan couldn't be readily played on an US-region console, or European PlayStation 2 games didn't work on Japanese PS2 consoles, et cetera, and even if they did work, they typically only included language options specific to their intended region of sale anyways. In the specific case of these imported copies of Mario RPG, the biggest practical difference is just that they have different age rating badges on the box based on their local region's rating systems, instead of the familiar North American ESRB system.

This really isn't anything new or unusual, and you can easily find many games available as cheaper grey-market import copies these days. These resellers simply happened to find some especially low-priced foreign copies of Mario RPG to import and flip, so that's why you've been seeing it crop up so cheap on third-party marketplaces lately. It is most certainly not because Nintendo has been instructing legit US retailers to lower the MSRP on the game, nor is it in any way indicative that the game is selling so poorly that Nintendo is in a panic and in response putting it on some sort of "unprecedented" fire sale to move stock, as some people seem to be imagining. See my response regarding the game's sales figures above.

Amazon has the UK version for $35 right now. It works on all platforms.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8VMWBWB

I'm not trying to argue against your premise, but that's a really bad cherry-picked example. FFPR's physical release in North America was a very limited one-time print run that was exclusively sold via Square-Enix's online store. It was a limited collector's item from the get go, and basically tailor-made to be quickly snatched up by collectors of physical ESRB-badged copies of niche games. You can't rightly make a comparison between that and a mass-produced wide release game available readily available at Walmart and Best Buy.