Below the Mendoza Line
Ah, September baseball. The air’s a little crisper, the nights are a little colder, and the games are a little more important. Well, a lot more important actually. The weather’s cooling down but the playoff races are heating up.
It’s also, apparently, the time to release a baseball game. Toward the tail end of the big league season, RBI Baseball 17 will launch on Nintendo Switch on September 5. Major League Baseball is making a to-do about how this will be the first officially licensed sports game on Switch.
Curiously, there’s a Switch tax of sorts at play. This port of RBI Baseball 17 will be priced at $30; the PS4 and Xbox One versions originally released at $20. There doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for a $10 price hike on the Switch, other than it’s a sports game on a platform that is lacking in that area. We’ve reached out to MLB for comment about this and will update this article if/when we receive a response.
But maybe the price doesn’t matter much because RBI Baseball 17 doesn’t seem to be a very good game. Not many outlets reviewed it (including us), but it’s currently sitting at a 23 percent on Open Critic. Over on Metacritic, all the scores are rated as negative. Maybe MLB’s audience is less in the discerning video game consumer and more in the impulsive fan who’s subjected to advertisements between innings on MLB TV.
Sports-loving Switch owners will have to ask themselves if they’re so starved for games that they’re willing to buy an overpriced tardy version of a game that was widely considered bad in the first place. That’s enough to make anyone balk.
