A classic Nintendo 3DS game has seen its resale price absolutely skyrocket over the past year. For the most part, many games from the Nintendo 3DS library are still relatively inexpensive. Outside of a couple of incredibly rare 3DS games that didn’t get manufactured in large quantities, most titles, especially those directly from Nintendo, are pretty easy to get ahold of without hurting your wallet. For one reason or another, though, this isn’t holding true with one 3DS game that remains popular to this day.
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Originally released in 2013 on Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo-developed game Tomodachi Life has been hitting ridiculous resale prices in recent months. For the better part of the past decade, Tomodachi Life has been a 3DS game that has been pretty cheap as it has only sold on average for anywhere between $10 and $40. In late 2023, though, this began to change and saw the resale price for Tomodachi Life rapidly increasing.
Based on data from Price Charting, resale values for Tomodachi Life reached absolutely ridiculous heights to close out 2024. In the month of December, loose copies of Tomodachi Life were selling for an average of over $150 on eBay, while CiB (complete in box) editions of the game were going for roughly $175. These resale values have since fallen a bit, but at the time of this writing, Tomodachi Life is still selling for about $140.
So why exactly is Tomodachi Life increasing in value so much? Well, it likely comes down to a few factors. For starters, Nintendo shut down the 3DS eShop this past year, which means that Tomodachi Life can no longer be purchased in a digital capacity. This means that those looking to own the game can only now do so if they have a physical cartridge.
Related: Nintendo 3DS Game Finally Canceled After Nearly a Decade
Other than this, it seems that Tomodachi Life has also become a popular game for Nintendo-focused content creators to make videos on in the past year. Naturally, this spotlighting of Tomodachi Life has led to a renewed interest in the game from viewers of these channels who then decide they want to purchase it for themselves.
With all of this being said, it seems like Tomodachi Life’s resale value should start to fall a bit in the weeks and months ahead. This spike in price is likely nothing more than a bubble, and as such, I’d recommend holding off a bit on picking up Tomodachi Life if you’re actively hunting it down. Still, even if its resale price does fall, it’s likely that Tomodachi Life will remain one of the pricier 3DS games barring the release of a new sequel or remake on modern Nintendo hardware.
