Why drop price and cut profits on whats already working like a chram. Nintendo will need this extra money next gen to compete with the much larger Sony & M$.

The strategy does not require non-competition at all. It requires a new market in which there is no competition. There is no reson not to compete in the red ocean as well. The blue ocean is taken already.

It has more to do with looking out for good efforts from third-parties than anything else. This is important for a long term strategy and if this scenario happens, it would not be good to just let go of the red sea market as well.

By the way, don't read stuff from Sean Malstrom. He is a HUGE fanboy, therefore blind, describing the current scenery. I don't think it's a good thing to listen to the description of a scenery from a blind guy. He might say everything you want to hear, but in the end, you're still getting an image from a blind guy.

Hummmm... what? Sony&Microsoft? A merger?

He didn't mean Sony & Microsoft like that. He just means Sony........... and Microsoft.

lol

Blue Ocean Strategy vs. competition based strategies

Kim and Mauborgne argue that traditional competition-based strategies (red ocean strategies) while necessary, are not sufficient to sustain high performance. Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities they also need to create blue oceans.^[9]

The authors argue that competition based strategies assume that an industry’s structural conditions are given and that firms are forced to compete within them, an assumption based on what academics call the structuralist view, or environmental determinism.^[10] To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of red ocean strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, becomes the defining variable of strategy. Here, cost and value are seen as trade-offs and a firm chooses a distinctive cost or differentiation position. Because the total profit level of the industry is also determined exogenously by structural factors, firms principally seek to capture and redistribute wealth instead of creating wealth. They focus on dividing up the red ocean, where growth is increasingly limited.^{[citation needed]}

Blue ocean strategy, on the other hand, is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. This is what the authors call “reconstructionist view”. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it. This, in turn, requires a shift of attention from supply to demand, from a focus on competing to a focus on value innovation—that is, the creation of innovative value to unlock new demand. This is achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost. As market structure is changed by breaking the value/cost tradeoff, so are the rules of the game. Competition in the old game is therefore rendered irrelevant. By expanding the demand side of the economy new wealth is created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities.^[11]

The price tag for Wii is at is a reasonable price and I personally think that Nintendo should keep it at. If PS3 and Xbox360 started dropping their prices even more in this year then Nintendo might have to reconsider the Wii's price. But for the time being there is no problem.

Once it is in stock there will be a price cut for the used market. This is good enough for 09

The answer would no, they shouldn't drop the price.  There is no incentive for them to do that, I don't know where you live, but here in the USA you are lucky if you can actually find a Wii in stock even after it has been out for 2 years.  They can't keep the Wii's in stock at the current price, why would they ever drop the price?  The question should be should nintendo produce more consoles, and the answer would be yes they should make more so they can maybe catch up to demand. 

Not everyone... but some will not buy other games. I wonder what percentage of sales go to these new gamers that will not play anything else.

Sorry about the term. I just dislike the term hardcore. I don't think mine came out right, but as bad as it is, it's still better than hardcore which I will not use to describe anyone.

The idea behind this thread was always on my mind. I decided to write it because of deadly creatures. I don't think this single game proves anything, but I still think this is a possible scenario.

Let´s say it this way, I don´t think it is going to happen until the end of the year/beginning 2010, because sales are still very strong outside Japan. In Japan, both MH1 and 3 will be released very soon, which will give a boost to hardware sales. Compared to prices in the US and EU, Wii is comparably cheap in Japan, and if they cut the price there, the US- and EU-gamers would complain. I think they hope in a big and long boost from Monster Hunter and Wii Sports resort.