How often do Nintendo games go on sale?

"How often do Nintendo games go on sale?" has two completely different answers, and knowing which one applies to the game you want is the difference between saving half the price and waiting three years for nothing. Third-party and indie Switch games discount constantly — something worth buying is on sale in the eShop every single week. Nintendo's own published games discount rarely, shallowly, and on their own schedule.

This page is about frequency: how often a discount actually lands, how deep it goes, and how long you should be willing to wait. For the calendar of eShop store events themselves, see our Nintendo eShop sale dates guide, which lays out the recurring seasonal windows.

Third-party and indie games: constantly

The eShop refreshes its deals every week, year-round. In practice that means:

• Weekly rotation. A new batch of discounts appears each week and the previous batch ends. Any given third-party game is likely to appear in one of these rotations several times a year.
• Publisher sales on top.Individual publishers run their own multi-day events repeatedly through the year, which is where a specific studio's whole catalog drops at once.
• Seasonal events several times a year.The broader eShop events — spring, mid-year, the Black Friday period and the December holiday sale — are where the deepest and widest cuts land.

For a popular indie, a realistic expectation is a meaningful discount every couple of months, with the best price of the year usually arriving in the November or December window. Waiting three or four weeks for a specific game to come round again is usually a reasonable bet; waiting six months for something dramatically better than its known floor price is not.

Nintendo's own games: rarely, and not by much

Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Splatoon, Animal Crossing and the rest of Nintendo's published catalog behave completely differently. These games hold their launch price for years, and when they do move, the cut is modest rather than dramatic. There is no version of the sale calendar where a flagship first-party game becomes a bargain the way a third-party game does.

The reason is straightforward commercial strategy: Nintendo's titles keep selling steadily for years, so the company has no reason to train buyers to wait. Anyone who has watched a six-year-old Mario game sit at its original price through four holiday seasons has seen the policy in action.

If a first-party game is what you want, the realistic routes to paying less are:

1. Buy the cartridge, not the download. Retailers discount physical copies on their own terms, especially around Black Friday. Nintendo controls the eShop price; it does not control what a shop does with its stock.
2. Buy second-hand. A used cartridge is the only reliable way to take a large chunk off a first-party price, and cartridges are durable.
3. Accept the price and use points. Digital eShop purchases earn Gold Points, which come off a later purchase. It is a small percentage rather than a discount, but it is the only one Nintendo reliably offers on its own games.

How long should you actually wait?

Use the game's publisher to set your patience:

• Indie or third-party, released over a year ago: wait. It will hit its usual floor within a couple of months, and there is no urgency.
• Third-party, released in the last few months: expect the first real cut around the three-month mark, with better ones at each seasonal event after that.
• Nintendo first-party, any age: do not wait for the eShop. Decide whether the asking price is worth it, then look at physical or second-hand copies if it is not.

The general release-to-discount curve behind all of this — which applies to every platform, not just Nintendo — is broken down in when do games go on sale.