Don’t Buy Pokémon Pokopia From Amazon

The Nintendo Switch 2’s Pokémon Pokopia launched last week at the hefty price of $69.99 for the physical edition, and has proven extraordinarily popular. Boxed copies of the Animal Crossing–meets–Viva Pinata life sim from Game Freak have sold out on the official Nintendo store, and it seems Amazon is rather excitedly recognizing the extra demand this causes and—as reported by IGN—has bumped the price of the game up to $79.99. Which is grim. And let’s not forget, this is a so-called game-key card, with no actual copy of the game in the box in the first place.

Amazon pricing is incredibly opaque, making it very hard to know what price an item actually should be, and indeed exactly from whom you’re buying it. Even when items are listed as being sold by the official seller, a close look at the fine print can reveal they’re in fact being shipped by third parties, so it’s never clear where to level blame for inflated prices. But whatever the cause, right now the four-day-old game has been marked up to a super-premium price on the world’s biggest store.

This whole situation becomes even more farcical when you recognize that the boxed copies don’t even contain the game anyway. This is Nintendo’s first foray into using the game-key cards that have been previously foisted on third-party developers, the only really affordable option for many given the rumored prices Nintendo charges for the 64 GB carts it offers. These contain a digital code that prompts your Switch 2 to download the game from the same online store you’d get it from if you bought the digital version. Many people still want to pick up the boxed versions despite this, not least because they want a physical object for their shelf, but also because the physical cart can be more easily shared between devices. (The previous and more significant advantage of being able to continue playing a game long after Nintendo switches off the store is of course completely moot here.)

Digital Derision

Of course, digital versions of the game are infinitely available, and can be bought directly from your console for the original price of $70. (That the digital game was originally priced the same without needing to cover costs for the physical box, the cart itself, shipping, storage, a store’s share of the sale, and so on, is something else you should be extremely angry about.) These, too, can be bought from Amazon for $70, although there is no reason in the universe to do so. When physical versions of something are scarce, it’s usually the scalpers who artificially increase the price, but in this case Amazon appears to have just cut out the middle man.

Usually we’d be hard-pressed to recommend grabbing a digital edition over a physical, given all that’s lost in the process, but given the farce of the game-key cards in this instance,you really may as well when the only other option is getting gouged by the store that’s selling it to you.