Don't pay full price for any Nintendo Switch game
On July 24 this year, Hades cost $24.99 in the American eShop. In the New Zealand one it was NZD 12.37, which is about $7.15. Same game, same console, same afternoon, 71% apart.
That took me fifteen seconds to find on Green Pipe, and I want to show you the exact path. I built this site and I still watch people use it the slow way: land on the homepage, scroll, hope something good floats past. The homepage is the worst door in the building.
What You Need to Know
- Search a Nintendo Switch game, and its page shows what it costs in every country that sells it, what it costs on Steam, and its cost per hour of play.
- Don't want to mess with foreign accounts?
/all-time-lowand/dealsboth work entirely inside your own country. - The wishlist needs no account. It also can't alert you yet.
- Prices refresh once a day.
Start with the search bar
If you already know which Nintendo Switch game you want, the search box at the top of every page is the whole product. Type three or four letters. Results appear as you type, because the box filters a list your browser already downloaded, so nothing is loading in the background while you wait.
It didn't always work. For a stretch last year, my search would confidently offer you a game, you'd click it, and you'd land on a 404. It got worse under the hood: searching "Dave the Diver" handed you a Godzilla DLC pack that happened to share a name after the colon, and that page didn't exist either. Two of my bugs stacked on top of each other, each making the other harder to see. Search now reads a prebuilt index generated from exactly the set of pages that actually exist, so every result goes somewhere real.
You will also fail to find plenty of games here, and that one's deliberate. I filtered a big chunk of the eShop out on purpose, because the Nintendo eShop has a long tail of shovelware that exists mainly to fill a storefront, and putting it in your search results would make the search worse for everyone.
Right now my database holds 184 titles with "Hentai" in the name. Among them: Hentai Puzzle: Muscular Guys, Hentai Girls: Charming Chef, and the quietly ambitious Real Hentai 5. There are another 46 jigsaw puzzle apps. Do you want those competing with your actual search? I made the call that you didn't.
If a game you genuinely want is missing, that's a different problem and I'd like to hear about it.
The game page is where the actual answer lives
Everything else on the site is a different route to this one page, so it's worth knowing what's on it.
The country table is the main event. One row per country, each showing that country's current price and discount, sorted so the cheapest eShop region sits at the top. Prices convert into whatever currency you pick, and that choice sticks, so you only set it once. Forty-eight countries, which is why the spread gets as wide as that Hades example.
Cost per hour is the number I think is most underrated on the whole site. It's the price of a Nintendo Switch game divided by how long it takes to finish, using HowLongToBeat's main-story estimate. A 40-hour RPG at $18 and a four-hour indie at $9 look similar on a receipt and are nothing alike as purchases. This one reframes the question from "is this cheap" to "is this worth it." Roughly one page in four won't show a cost per hour, because not every game has a completion-time estimate to divide by.
The Steam price appears when the game sells on both Steam and the Nintendo eShop, so you can see which store wins today. Matching two catalogues automatically is imperfect work, and sequels and regional variants trip it up. Where I'm not confident the two listings are the same game, I show no comparison at all.
A cheap price you can't pay isn't a cheap price
Here's the catch, and I'm going to be completely straight about it, because this is the part where people lose money.
That country table will happily show you a wonderful price in a store that won't take your card. So every country carries a note about what buying there actually involves: whether international cards work, whether you'll need local payment or a gift card, and where the tax gets strange. Some regions are genuinely easy. Others need a local payment method you don't have and can't easily get. Read the note before you get attached to a number.
I want to close that gap properly one day and put the gift card right there on the page, whether that ends up coming from Nintendo or somewhere like Eneba, so the cheap price and the means to pay it stop living on two different websites. That's also, honestly, how a site like this starts paying for itself. If I get there, I hope you'll use it.
You don't want to switch regions. I got you.
So — you'd rather not set up a New Zealand account and hunt down a gift card just to save fifteen dollars on Hades. Completely fair. Most people won't, and honestly, most days I won't either.
That's genuinely why these two pages exist.
All-Time Lows is the strictest filter on the site. It shows games sitting at the lowest price I've seen them hit, in your own country, buyable right now with the card already in your wallet. No second account, no comparison shopping, no cleverness required. When a game shows up here, the only question left is whether you want it.
Deals is the wide version of the same idea: everything discounted in your region today. Both pages have a hub and then a page per country, so you pick yours once and stay there.
Once you've got those two, the rest is quick:
- Switch vs Steam: own a PC too? See which store is cheaper today.
- Exclusives: Switch exclusives on sale, for when you're wondering if you can get it anywhere else at all.
- Switch 2: the Switch 2 catalogue. The great majority are priced now, with a handful still filling in as new titles land.
- Categories: Metroidvania, Cozy, and Party, each sortable by ending soon, lowest price, or newest sale. Three for now. More coming.
The wishlist, and why it has no login
Star a game and it's saved. There's no account, no email, no password, because the list lives in your own browser and never touches my server.
The tradeoff comes first, before you rely on it: that list won't follow you to your phone, and clearing your site data clears it. And it can't yet tell you when a price drops, which is the single most requested thing anyone asks me for. More on that in a moment.
Why I built this in the first place
I learned this whole category from eShop-Prices and DekuDeals. I used both for years, they're genuinely good, and if you're happy with them you should keep using them. This isn't a takedown.
But I kept running into the same wall. I'd want to ask a slightly harder question than either would answer. Not "what's on sale," which they both do well, but "show me everything under five dollars that takes more than twenty hours to finish and that I can actually buy from here." That's a filtering and analysis question, and I couldn't get at it from the outside.
So I built Green Pipe. I should be upfront that I'm not much of an engineer, which you may have gathered from the part earlier where my own search engine sent people to a page that didn't exist. What came out is what a determined amateur builds when he's annoyed enough: rough in places, honest about it, and pointed hard at one thing.
Avis spent the sixties advertising "We're only No. 2. We try harder." That's more or less the whole business plan here.
What's coming next
Price alerts are the loudest request by a wide margin, and I don't have a date for you. The site is built as a set of pages rebuilt once a day, which is why it loads the way it does, and it's also why alerts are hard: they need something running that watches prices for each individual person. That's a real decision I haven't made yet. I'd rather say so than promise you a month.
Also in the pile: deeper filtering on the browse pages, which closes the loop on the exact itch that started all this. More categories, which is the easy one. A portfolio view that tells you what the games you already own are worth right now. And more of the catalogue getting pages as coverage fills in.
If the thing you want isn't on that list, tell me. The list is mostly other people's suggestions already.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an account to use Green Pipe?
Not today. Everything on the site works without one, and your wishlist saves in your browser. Maybe further down the line: some of the features I'd like to build would need you to register an account on my site, alerts being the obvious one. If that day comes, everything that works right now will keep working without a login.
How often do prices update?
Once a day. For a sale running all week, that's fine. For a flash sale ending in the next hour, it's a real limitation, and you should check the store before you commit to anything time-sensitive.
Why doesn't every game have a page?
Because I left a lot of the eShop out on purpose. The store carries a deep well of shovelware, and giving all of it pages would bury the games you came for. If something you actually want is missing, tell me and I'll look into it.
Can I get an alert when a game goes on sale?
Not yet, and it's the most requested feature by a distance. It needs infrastructure the site currently doesn't have, so I'm weighing whether to build it properly or not at all. No date.
How does the site make money?
Ads, plus affiliate links to game-card retailers, where a purchase may pay me a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't touch prices or rankings, both of which come straight from the stores. Full detail on the affiliate disclosure page.
If you take one thing from this: go search a game you already want, and look at what it costs three countries over. And if it has the ATL badge, just buy it.
Lynch.