unwelcome tour

2025-04-05

Why pay for a glorified tech demo when other consoles largely offered pack-in games for free? The Astro Bot series paved the way to the paid Astro Bot title which won the Game of the Year award for 2024. Valve's Steam Deck, gaining visibility as predicted by my switch 2 exploits, has its own free pack-in title in Aperture Desk Job. Nintendo's very own Wii Sports oozes much more playability and nostalgia than offered by the limited video previews of the Welcome Tour for the Switch 2. With a name like Welcome Tour inspiring instruction manuals and application onboarding, you would expect it to be packaged with the game. Instead, the offering feels like a marketing fumble or a bait-and-switch setup to make it free due to backlash.

Here is a table comparing recent pack-in games and tech demos across video game consoles, ordered by price. Do you notice something odd here?

It's a similar problem as I mentioned within the exotics problem: "Lacking [...] a free price tag in a largely free niche can spell doom for adoption." Why would you want your offering to become the Threema of its class? While they learned something with how 1-2-Switch is still priced at $50, you would think that Nintendo would read the room.

The minimal minigame presentations within the Welcome Tour also beg the question of why Switch 2 users would need to buy it if they can just watch a longplay on YouTube. Compare that response to the resounding success that Sony offered their consumers with the continuing Astro Bot series. While both video game companies have their blessings and faults, which one do you think has the better tech demo title for their latest console offering?

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