This trick I use to save money on video games will be vital for expensive Nintendo Switch 2 games

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll no doubt have seen the ongoing discourse about increasing video game prices. Nintendo has been at the heart of this discussion with the unveiling of the Switch 2. The $80 price tag for Mario Kart World marks a new high for a standard edition game from Nintendo, after The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom raised the bar to $70 in 2023. Fears are also growing that 2026’s most anticipated title, Grand Theft Auto 6, could go even further and break the $100 barrier.

Without getting into whether or not these prices are justified, it’s clear that many consumers are feeling the pain. With just about everything getting more expensive these days, video games are starting to feel like a luxury purchase that many people are in danger of being priced out of. Thankfully, all is not lost, as there are still ways for savvy gamers to save a bit of cash.

Enter Deku Deals

This post is something of a PSA for anyone who’s not yet heard of Deku Deals, a website/app that’s been around since 2018. It’s a price tracker designed exclusively for video games — you simply find the game you want, add it to your wishlist, and you’ll get an email or push notification when it goes on sale. As the Zelda-inspired name suggests, it only covered Nintendo Switch games at first, but the developers expanded to add PlayStation and Xbox games in 2021. That was followed more recently by Steam support, which is currently available in beta. You can even sync your Steam wishlist with the click of a button.

The no-nonsense design of Deku Deals lets you get straight to the task of adding games to your wishlist and finding great deals. Aside from the price at various retailers in your country, each game page has tons of other useful information. There’s a price history graph so you can see if there’s been a bigger discount previously. There are screenshots and videos for most titles, so you can see what a game looks like without leaving the page. It shows you each game’s Metacritic and OpenCritic scores, and includes information about game length from HowLongToBeat. It also tells you if there’s a demo available so you can try before you buy.

Another well-implemented feature is the recommendation system that suggests similar games based on what other people have wishlisted or played. Once you’ve bought a game, you can move it from your wishlist to your collection and give it a rating out of five stars. You can also create custom lists if you want to be even more organised about things.

The best feature has to be the notification system. By default, you’ll get an email every time a game on your wishlist goes on sale. If a bunch of games go on sale at the same time, these will be combined into a single email rather than spamming you with multiple messages. Notifications are very to-the-point, showing just price, discount percentage, and whether or not it’s an all-time low. If you’ve got the app installed — it’s really just a web wrapper — you can get push notifications as well. While the Android app works pretty well, there are complaints about the iOS app logging users out unexpectedly, so your mileage may vary there.

Something else I’ve come to appreciate is that the developers of Deku Deals are quick to add brand-new games after a showcase like a Nintendo Direct. They’ll add a special section to the homepage straight away, alongside all the other helpful filters such as ‘hottest deals’ and ‘recent price drops’. The site has had a Nintendo Switch 2 page up since it was first announced, and it even lists hardware and accessories, as well as software.

As anyone who owns a Switch can attest, the eShop is a mostly miserable experience. It’s slow and laggy, it’s full of shovelware, and it’s just not great at surfacing games you might want to play. Deku Deals is superior in just about every way, with excellent filters and recommendations to help you discover new titles that are up your street. And because it tracks both physical and digital copies, you can choose whichever format saves you the most money. I used to go for mostly digital, so tempting was the idea of not having to bother changing game cartridges and having everything easily accessible. But through using Deku Deals, I’ve increasingly found myself purchasing physical games when there’s a decent discount, knowing that I can then resell them later on eBay if I’m not fussed about replaying.

Contrary to popular belief, even Nintendo’s first-party games go on sale sometimes. Just recently, for example, you could get Super Mario Bros. Wonder for 33% off on the eShop in the UK. At the time of writing, it’s 26% off for the physical copy from Amazon UK. I picked up Metroid Prime: Remastered for 15% off its MSRP from ShopTo (discount UK games retailer) soon after it first released for Switch. After playing through it, I then resold it on eBay for almost as much as I originally paid for it.

Where Deku Deals has really shone is helping me to work through my backlog of indie titles, for a fraction of the price. If you don’t mind playing games a little while after they release, you can save yourself plenty of cash. I played through some of my favourite games long after the hype (and price) had gone down. Indie classics like Hollow Knight, Celeste, Cuphead, and Tunic cost me next to nothing — these are some of my most memorable gaming experiences in recent memory.

Looking ahead to the Nintendo Switch 2, it’s important to note that you’re not going to instantly see huge discounts on games, and especially not on first-party titles. But if you’re willing to be patient, Deku Deals should be able to help ease the pain of the new pricing era we’re being dragged into.

Deku Deals is run by a small team, including founder and indie game developer Michael Fairley, Nintendeal’s Andrew Wolf, and software developer Scott Parker. They recently hosted an AMA on the Nintendo Switch subreddit where they went into detail about their motivations and the inner workings of Deku Deals. They’re incredibly popular with the community, for obvious reasons, and they seem to genuinely get a kick out of making great games accessible for as many people as possible. They also recently launched a podcast — Talk a Good Game — where they talk about the games they love and chat to interesting industry folk.

It’s worth noting that they aren’t the only ones doing this. For Switch, there’s eshop-prices.com, and Xbox players have XBDeals.net. The PlayStation-focused PSPrices.com also tracks Switch and Xbox games, as well as some iOS and Meta Quest titles. Fairley himself has stated that the PC gaming site IsThereAnyDeal.com was a big inspiration for him, too. In spite of the competition, Deku Deals remains the clear winner due to its extensive features and clean user experience, so it’s an easy recommendation for me to make. Having a unified wishlist that also includes Steam is such a game-changer.

While I’m obviously very fond of Deku Deals, I must end with a word of warning. It’s no doubt a great way to save money on video games. But it’s also very easy to spend even more money, since you’ll likely buy games you might not otherwise have purchased because you’ve seen a killer deal. At least you’ll never be short of amazing games to play — so I suppose it’s a win-win.