Love Nintendo's 3DS? Enough To Pay $70 Per Title?

Imagine a world where the handheld titles are costing you more than the console titles.  Now imagine that if it were real, but you had to pay it in Yen.  If you were expecting a lot out of the 3DS, you would be right, as it has shown some amazing potential so far in system performance, but clearly the system, as it is releasing soon internationally, is showing it's downsides day after day.


Confirmed across much of the internet in the last few days, the 3DS already stood out among it's predecessors as having a much shorter life when compared to the Lite model of the DS series.  Five to eight hours of battery as compared to around 15 hours of life from the Lite. (And that's only for the regular DS titles) Early estimations by Nintendo showed us that these specifications should be around 9 hours of life to 12, however manufacturer estimations always seem to rate higher than true-to-life use.

The real story this week however falls upon the cost of the 3DS' titles, as they have been widely released in Japan for pre-order. Sources around the net are beginning to point at the cost of 3DS titles in Japan, and the cost of the hardware, then doing the math and getting very upset at what they see.  If you were to take the ridiculous estimation of 5800 yen, and 25,000 yen respectively, and do a natural conversion, that's going to make the 3DS cost about $300 USD for the handheld, and upward of $70 USD for a game!

These prices, though they could be reflective of the costs of the hardware and IPs for the individuals who will be buying them in Japan, may likely not reflect the costs of the same titles and hardware in other regions.  Prices of DS titles, as they currently reflect in cost in the states might show you what I mean.  Go on YesAsis.com when viewing prices today and it will show that Mario Kart DS should be costing us Americans 53 dollars to buy the IP, however we plainly will pay no more than $35 here stateside at any retailer.

Let's just hope that for the sake of the cost of gaming, 3DS doesn't keep up the dollars when it comes across the Pacific.  I don't want to pay double for a title, just to have it in 3D, when it doesn't really contribute to better game play so far as I've seen.