Skyrim Anniversary Edition shadow dropped on the Nintendo Switch last week to the surprise of everybody and nobody simultaneously. This might seem like great news for fans hoping to finally play all the additional content added to the Anniversary Edition on the hybrid console, but there’s a hefty price tag attached to it. Bethesda is now the first major publisher to pull the trigger on the $70 price tag for a Nintendo Switch release.
The Skyrim Anniversary Edition does add plenty of new content that was previously featured on the Creation Club, including new quests, gear, a fishing mini-game and a bit more. On other consoles, players can choose to purchase the edition outright for either $50 or upgrade from Skyrim Special Edition to Anniversary Edition for $20. However, if you’re looking to purchase the latest edition of Skyrim for the first time on Switch, be prepared to pay $70 for it.
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As Kotaku pointed out, it’s possible that Bethesda chose to price Skyrim Anniversary Edition at $70 on Switch because they simply refused to discount the base game, which still costs around $60. Sales and discounts on Switch are a rarity anyway, but this shouldn’t be an excuse for Bethesda to up the price on a game that essentially came out over 10 years ago.
More importantly, the $70 price increase is still highly debated in the gaming community for new AAA releases, let alone remasters of decade-old titles.
To make matters worse, Reddit users are quickly discovering that Skyrim Anniversary Edition on Switch somehow runs worse than the Special Edition, with plenty of framerate drops noted. This may be caused by the add-on content present in the new edition, but that also begs the question if any performance and quality checks were done in the first place. The Nintendo Switch version sadly doesn’t have the benefit of being fixed through mods since it doesn’t support them, unlike the PlayStation and Xbox versions which can be patched with mods.
Hopefully this doesn’t set an example for other publishers to follow, though the chances of that happening now that Bethesda has made the first push are very likely. Ubisoft, Activision, Sony, Square Enix and Take-Two have all adopted the $70 price tag already.
Source: Kotaku
