In the early gold rush days of the Switch, devs could find easy success with an audience hungry for games (even 1-2-Switch somehow sold over 3 million copies). Nowadays, games need to stand out in the eShop melee in order for players to buy them in large volumes. How better to do this therefore then releasing a total of seven games in one hit; all the BioShock and Borderlands games, along with XCOM 2 in one day! (We’ll never know what 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown did to offend 2K so it was left out the party.) It’s undeniable that all of these games arriving together has created more of an event than releasing them all piecemeal would have done.
For the first time too, these games will all be properly playable portably (I’ll quickly gloss over Borderlands’ Vita release…), a fact that 2K knows full well will help people to justify the cost of entry. Lots of people will have played through these games once or even several times before, but there’s just something about being able to play games like these portably that turn us into crazy game-buying fools that’ll happily part with our cash.
Are the prices too high for games that are all quite old now? Quite possible, but 2K know their business and a lot of people will be excited enough to play these games on the go at any price, and those that aren’t can wait for their inevitable eShop sale appearances. While these are all old games, they are still new to players that only own Nintendo consoles. So people shouldn’t underestimate the number of people out there that haven’t had the chance or simply never got round to playing any of these games before.