| happydolphin said: 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). |
I didn't ignore you, I just rushed back through to Rol's post. Sorry.
The 3DS didn't need to launch early because of the Vita thread, It helped, certainly, but it didn't need to. I think Nintendo launched it so "soon" to counter the losses/stock drops.
Rol would be right that usually, for a Nintendo handheld a 10 Million lead wouldn't be much. Not enough? That's a different story, but a 10 Million lead is still a lead. There are a lot of factors, you missed out a big one - Mobile gaming.
