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happydolphin on 10 February 2012
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Carl2291 said:
RolStoppable said:

Yes, I think the 3DS would have dropped like a rock after the holiday season, because the system was priced out of the massmarket range. The question isn't if a $250 launch for the 3DS could have been better executed (because it obviously could as your example shows), but rather if the $250 price tag could have sustained for well over a year or two, because that's what shows the success of a product.

In your scenario, Mario Kart 7 would have given the 3DS another boost, but what about the summer months of 2012? 3DS sales would have gone down and down and down, forcing Nintendo to drop the price by at least $50 for the holiday season. So once again, within a year the price needed to be dropped.

As it is, the 3DS at $170 still has problems to put up good sales outside of Japan (January NPD suggests 200k in the USA); and even in Japan they aren't overly impressive either.


If we're talking sustained as in 2 Years, then I admit I'm wrong. I don't think the 3DS would have been able to hold the $250 pricepoint for 2 Years. I think it would have been fine with a cut taking it to $200 though, maybe before the Holiday push of 2012... Especially with Mario ready for it. They would still have been bringing in huge profits and I think sales would have been alright leading up to the Holiday push, staying at the front of the pack for Weekly sales.

January NPD has been suggested to be wrong. Really wrong by almost everybody. Even Pachter is calling it out. Using that to try prove a point wont work this time around. I also think 75k in Japan is pretty good considering one game worth buying has been released since December.

We might even have differing ideas on what a success would be for 2 Years at a +$200 pricepoint. Do you think that ~25 Million in 2 Years would have been good at above $200 on pure profit? I think 25 Million in 2 Years would have been doable (And good) for the 3DS if it released with the strategy I said. You probably disagree and I understand if/why you do.

I agree with this strategy. At 250$ for the holiday 2011 period with Mario 3DL and MK7, plus the usual holiday push, it would've sold with a holiday spike as usual, yielding high profits. If you'll say "then why didn't it work with the Vita at $250?", the simple answer is that, at that pricepoint, it's the games that matter, especially true during holiday season. And then, come summer, a cut to 200$ would've sufficed to sustain momentum, coupled with some casual offerings (since casuals buy at lower price).

But as I said in my earlier post, Carl (opinion which was ignored by all of you elite posters), is that Nintendo needed to release the 3DS early 2011 so as to ensure its foothold and early start in the market as compared to its competitor. For that reason, the 250$ pricepoint post holidays 2010 was impossible to sustain. 200$ thus at a post-holidays launch would've been a reasonable price for the hand-held. Coupled with low-cost AAA software (like 2D remakes) and Nintendo AAA big names as well as casual offerings, that was the only solution for a post-holiday launch, to keep investors happy. Also, predictions would have needed to fall some 5 millions, to say 10mil. Rol argues that 10mil was not enough to promote generation leadership of Nintendo, I'm still researching that. He may be right, but there are new factors to consider this gen (Playstation brand greatly diminished, Nintendo portable HW finally capable of high-end SD graphics, stronger 3rd party relations with certain devs).