After many voices of disappointment, the game’s pricing was changed before the release.
You might have heard that due to various reasons (including additional production costs) RiME will cost more on release day on the Nintendo Switch console. It was priced at $39.99 and many users of this hardware weren’t too happy with this.
It was now confirmed by Grey Box, the developers of RiME, that the price for Nintendo Switch was reduced to $29.99 in digital. It gets interesting with the retail release and here’s the official explanation:
On the physical side, we can’t lower the price without selling at a loss, but we can add more value to the package. And that’s what we’re doing. For the Nintendo Switch version of RiME, all physical copies will include a printed code for a download of the complete, beautiful soundtrack by David García (a sample of which you can find here). You will be able to download the music via Bandcamp in one of the multiple high-quality formats. The soundtrack is planned on being sold separately for $10 in the US (and equivalent prices elsewhere), and so the value you’re going to get out of this will be the same as somebody who purchased a different version of RiME, and then bought the soundtrack.