Wii Baseline HW Sales after May 15 Price Cut?

[SaviorX]

TheSource said:

Let's assume the cut to $150 is real, and mimicked outside the USA in various currencies. What do you expect the Wii baseline to be? In the USA Wii has been $150 before, for brief periods as a loss leader to get store traffic over Christmas. $200 --> $150 is a 25% price cut across the board though.

I'm going to assume Wii stabilizes at 115k / week at $200 until May 15 (60k / 45k / 10k roughly between Americas, EMEAA, Japan).

In the week after the price cut I'm going to say:

- 150k Americas  I'll say 120k

- 20k Japan

- 100k EMEAA

For the next two weeks (til end of May), hw will decline 10-15% from the initial large lift.

By June, I think figures stabilize at these levels for a couple months (June 1 - Aug 1 at least):

- 110k 80k Americas (60k ish base line currently)

- 14k 11k Japan (9k base line currently)

- 70k 60k EMEAA (45k baseline currently)

Presumably after July, the price cut will begin to wear off, particularly if PS3 / X360 get price cuts but more software will arrive after E3 you have to figure.

Over Nov-Dec we'll likely see another large spike particularly if Walmart / BB etc give away $50 - $75 gift cards with Wii (even if you just want Wii for 2-3 games, it becomes a steal at $175 for a NEW console and three-four games).

I have no faith in this price cut being significant for more than 3 weeks worldwide due the complete lack of software to launch or support it. Also, the summer months have never been kind to hardware sales in the first place; better to leave it for late September like last time.

When Nintendo releases software this year, assuming everything we heard of is indeed for 2011, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it will match 2010 numbers within 7%. I mean, Dragon Quest is good for at least 2.75m in Japan and probably 75k in hardware. Zelda is prime for 5.25 million at least and substantial boosting worldwide (25k-40k).

Kirby helps to keep things moving and I'm guessing at least one of their other E3 titles will work in conjunction with that. Pikmin, I can't even guarantee for this year, but evergreen sales of the new Wii Play may provide small help.