That's quite possible, actually. Nintendo always focuses on Sony and see themselves in direct competition for 3rd party support. A price cut to $149 ($169 for XL) would help the 3DS in the west. The handheld gaming market is highly price sensitive - small price cuts can increase sales substantially. I'd certainly appreciate it.

What a suprise, Uncle Scrooge would appreciate a pricecut

The price drop should help a bit -- but what SONY also needed was to announce new games as well.

As for the price impact outside of Japan, well ~$199 promotions have been around on and off for a while but maybe retailers might be willing to sell the hardware at ~$189 or $179 (depending on how much the retail mark-up is and how much they make off memory card / software sales)

You think I got rich buying my consoles at launch? Pah! I didn't buy an NES till the price dropped to $49 (with Mario + Duck Hunt included!) and even then I talked that employee into giving me 20% off. When Capcom made a game about me I talked them into paying me a $20 royalty for each game sold, waited till the price of the game dropped to $19.99 and bought 100k copies of my own game just to make a profit! ...I later buried the copies in a landfill in New Mexico (for free! Nolan Bushnell said I could use the empty space next to the copies of E.T.)

anyones noticed that Kingdom Hearts HD is been released next month in Japan and there is still no Vita version announced ?

that's odd

Haha, nice reply to that lil jab at your username :D

In the UK I have seen a Vita + 1 game and a 4GB memory card for £179.99. So the price cut needs to be around £159.99 to have any impact at all.

It has plenty of games, hell, it even has games for free. Games can no longer be used as an excuse, can it?

You do realize there's a difference in dropping MSRP, and the retailer's discretion for dropping the price themselves right?

Dropping MSRP will result in even lower retailer prices because they are paying less per console to the manufacturer, so have more room to mark down while chipping into their profit margins.

Also, the Vita prices are higher in Japan to start with. I would probably expect £175 with retailers taking it down to £150. But also note that Sony doesn't set an RRP in the UK any more since it means so little

The most exciting thing for me is FFX, I have been fearing that it is heading into vapourware territory, but now there is hope again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But of course, they are announcing an announcement... and it might never leave Japan. I have always thought an FF European release was inevitable, but after Type 0 I can't be so confident