The famous quote from Satoru Iwata the fourth president and chief executive officer the CEO of Nintendo who died in 2015 stated: "I don’t think it’s reasonable to make someone pay for a game and then prepare a network connection and charge a monthly fee." doesn't seem to have phased Nintendo one bit.
In the past Nintendo Online was a free service. Initially when the Nintendo Switch made its debut it was free to go online. Imagine paying for the video games, and your own Internet connection then having to pay Nintendo on top of that?
Also the Nintendo video games are not cheap and they rarely drop in price thanks to Nintendo fanboys. Nintendo fanboys are the typical lardo-types who will buy anything Nintendo related regardless of price. They're the types who get angry when you "see things" for what they are.
It later came out that the first Nintendo Switch released didn't have good hardware. Which is weird how the Dreamcast by SEGA flopped due to the high price range but the Nintendo Switch prevailed.
You can't really blame the era. Because for the Dreamcast era, that was considered the new graphics of its time. However SEGA did have competition with Nintendo and PlayStation back then, nowadays SEGA is no longer in the running and are practically defunct but still trying to make money with the Sonic the Hedgehog series.
Satoru Iwata died before the Nintendo Switch launched. So we'll never really know if he as CEO could have made that decision for free online gaming. But when the Switch launched it was initially free for one year. Nintendo saw that Sony and Microsoft were doing it so they decided to join in.
Nintendo fanboys will often lie and claim that "it is too expensive" forgetting how rich of a company Nintendo is. And how they were able to run free online gaming for the Wii and Wii U. People who make excuses are sickening and only promote "money making" schemes.
Another blatant lie by Nintendo is that Switch game cartridges are more expensive to produce than Blu-rays employed by other formats and that is why they are so expensive. It is claimed the cost of the cartridge depends on the size of the game, with 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB cards available.
If that is so. Why are the virtual downloaded games from the direct Nintendo store the exact same price if not higher than the game cartidges sold in stores?
They don't use cartridges right?