Nintendo eShop Tries to Prevent Buyer’s Remorse

I just noticed that when you look at a game listing in Nintendo’s eShop, in either the website or the Switch store, if you already own the game it doesn’t show you the current price.

I just bought Thumper since it’s on sale for five bucks in North America, and if I view the listing in an incognito window, it shows as twenty bucks marked down to five. Viewed while logged in to my Nintendo account, it shows as twenty bucks. Viewed on my Switch, it doesn’t show a price at all.

I assume this is to prevent the frustration of buying something and then immediately seeing it on sale for less than you paid, and possibly related customer complaints/requests-for-belated-discounts. I’m curious if they have any numbers to suggest it’s worthwhile for that purpose, but naively it seems misguided.

First, I’m very skeptical that it even works. When you look at the list of what games are currently on sale, that doesn’t filter out games you already own. I check that list far more often than I look at individual listings of games I already own, and many times I’ve seen games for which I paid more.

Second, I’m not generally a fan of hiding this kind of information from the customer - and the website goes one step farther and presents inaccurate information. This could easily backfire - suppose I’m telling my friend that Thumper is cool so they ask how much it is, and I tell them it’s twenty bucks because that’s the price I see, and that’s above their threshold when the actual sale price isn’t? I doubt this happens a lot but I’d expect it happens more often than someone is upset to learn that the game they just bought is on sale now not from checking the list of current sales but from going to that game’s individual listing.

This just feels like a weird strategy to me, and I doubt the benefits outweigh the dishonesty.