Video Games

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom price hike leaked on the eShop

Seems like both Link and the game's price soar upwards

Marco Wutz

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom price hike leaked on the eShop
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom price hike leaked on the eShop /

A listing on the Nintendo Switch eShop, which was quickly taken down, seems to indicate that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom might cost more than most titles for the console.

Noticed by Twitter user Wario64, the price for Tears of the Kingdom, which had previously been blank, was updated to $69.99. However, Nintendo quickly reversed the shop update, so it seems like the listing came a bit prematurely. The Nintendo Direct show on February 8, 2023, is likely going to be the stage for the official price announcement.

Preorders for the game at retailers like Amazon and GameStop were hitherto listed for $59.99, but have now been taken down, which indicates that the price hike may well be correct.

If the leak turns out to be right, Tears of the Kingdom will cost around $10 more than most of the Nintendo Switch’s other big games – in fact, Nintendo has not sold a game for more than $60 in the US since the days of the GameCube.

Tears of the Kingdom is the highly anticipated sequel to 2017’s critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game was first announced at E3 in 2021, and has since been given a release date of May 21, 2023.

In recent years, many PS5 games have also been sold for around $70, so it’s possible that Nintendo feels confident it can command a similar price for top titles – which might well be true, considering the hype behind Tears of the Kingdom.

While fans are obviously unhappy with this potential price increase, they are especially concerned about the general lack of discounts for Nintendo games after their release – while titles on other platforms may cost $70 as well, they are regularly offered at discounted prices during special sales. This is a very rare occurrence for Switch titles, though, which are often sold at their original price for the entirety of their lifespan.

Nintendo has not yet made a statement on the commotion, but with the Nintendo Direct coming up in a few hours anyways, any open questions will probably be answered there and then.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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