For Nintendo fans, the past few weeks have been the best of the times, and also the worst of times. We’ve seen the company truly shine, like with the release of Metroid Dread and Sakurai’s victory lap on Super Smash Bros Ultimate rolling out its final fighter. But also seen Nintendo at their absolute worst, with the reveal of pricing details for NSO + Expansion Pack.

See, along with an Animal Crossing Direct, Nintendo announced the pricing and release date for the new higher tier of their Switch Online service. And WOW, it is a genuinely HUGE increase.

Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack will cost $49.99/yr for an individual membership and $79.99/yr for a family membership. Mind you, this is a service which normally costs $20/yr or $35/yr for the family plan. So the "Expansion Pack" tier is more than double the price. That’s insane.

And hey, judging from the YouTube video’s ratings, I’m not the only one who thinks so this is ridiculous. To date, the video has over five times as many Dislikes (84K) as it has Likes (16K)…ouch…

At $50 for an individual subscription, NSO is now priced comparably to online subscriptions offered by PlayStation and Xbox. Which I’m sure their marketing analysts must had noted as a possible justification for pulling a massive price hike. But NSO is a completely inferior product, so utterly outclassed by PSN and Xbox Game Pass, that I don’t think you can even compare them.

In fact, the go-to excuse NSO apologists have long used for it being such a joke of a service, is the fact that the subscription is so incredibly cheap. But nope, not anymore—not if you want N64 games. For that you pay double.

Plus, if you’re a NSO Family Plan subscriber like me, then this new pricing tier is way too high; just outright laughable. Upon hearing about the prices, I merely joked that I would need to invoice my Family Plan members in order to afford it, and one friend left my family group immediately. So yeah…that’s not a positive sign.

And then there’s the fact that new paid DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is included with NSO+. (Yeah, that’s right; I’m already abbreviating this crap. Because even the name is profoundly stupid.) While that sounds like an olive branch meant to appease disheartened fans, it also sets a strange precedent for tying game content purchases to active subscriptions.

Will other main Nintendo titles—like the upcoming Zelda BOTW 2: Dungeon Boogaloo (or whatever its final title ends up being)—also have DLC that NSO+ subscribers will get for free? Will they roll out an even higher tier for that one?

And then what happens if/when your subscription ends? Will Nintendo actually take away that game content from you? These potential pitfalls are all pretty bizarre and wholly unnecessary.

Honestly, the only reason I subscribe to NSO is so I can have access to classic Nintendo games on my Nintendo Switch. I am literally that one guy who regularly boots up the NES app just to play Dr. Mario. Obviously we’d all prefer if Nintendo charged us for the privilege of emulating individual game titles on Switch, like the old Virtual Console days. Then we could keep our chosen games in perpetuity. But clearly their strategy is lock players into a subscription for all time, always.

As a diehard fan who buys basically everything Nintendo puts out, even I think this new higher tier of NSO is way too expensive. It is wildly, outlandishly, insultingly overpriced, and I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Especially since they decided to use N64 games—something players have been clamoring for nearly for the entire life span of the console—to put the squeeze on us. Somehow that feels especially callous.

And hey, we still can’t play Game Boy or Game Boy Advance games on this thing? Why?!

Do I want to play Dr. Mario 64 with a Switch-level of modern convenience? Hell yeah, I do! But in the immortal words of Switch, the character from The Matrix: “Not like this…”