| Kresnik said:
No offence, but I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. You're trying to say that Nintendo's price cut hasn't set a precedent for other consoles? Because we're already seeing the effects of it now: people like Pie and others on this site, various bloggers, analysts etc ALL saying it needs a price cut. Now, I'm not saying that it doesn't need a price cut, but what I'm trying to suggest is it doesn't have to be - and shouldn't be - the first thing Sony try to boost sales. In your post you talk about Nintendo wanting to continue being the #1 handheld maker so they can fend off the competition from mobiles. That's fair enough, but I don't know who at Nintendo would see Vita as a threat of stealing their handheld crown. They've won every generation of the handheld market they've been in. PSP managed 50% of the sales of the DS. And the DS brand has a lot more recognition going for it at the minute. I'm sure the price cut helped them achieve their goal of staying number one, but knocking $80 dollars of when they were already 99% certain to beat the Vita is way, way too much. |
I made a typo in my original post, see fix above... my bad :(
@no offense. None taken, we're just talking. I don't think it's a precedent, nor a trend Nintendo wishes to keep. Like I tried to explain, Nintendo only did this in this circumstance. The reason why they were aggressive with the 3DS in my opinion, like you saw above and I'll dive deeper, is that the PSP had managed to snag a good portion of the japanese software support, SW that normally should have been coming out for the market leader like in every other gen. Seeing that easily migrate onto the PSV, Nintendo aggressively cut that short, and secured Monster Hunter (main series) on the portable. Why would they do this, why was japanese software so important? Well for one it's what kept the PSP well alive past a point where the DS had completely dominated it in sales. Second, there was a chance that the Vita could use that momentum to beat the 3DS (which was off to a very shaky start). The 3DS' success was far from guaranteed as your post would suggest, just backtrack a year ago and none of us were certain as to how well the 3DS would do, take a look at some of the older Nintendo forum threads, there was much debate. With the PSP already capturing a much larger portion of the pie than any competitor before it, there was no reason to believe that, on round 2, that Sony could not actually come up on top, at least on the long run, with a better product (the Vita is much more interesting than the PSP in every way you look at it, bar games atm).
Ultimately that loss of market dominance wouldn't so badly matter, as Nintendo has already survived loss of markets leadership, but I think Nintendo was aggressive here for two reasons. 1) They have never lost market dominance in the handheld market before, and I believe they wanted to fully secure that position beyond doubt. 2) The handheld space has been Nintendo's lifeline for as long as we can remember. 3) I believe Nintendo saw the threat of mobile devices and wanted to be the leader of the alternative (dedicated handhelds) so as to better control and fend off the threat.
I think that should give more depth to my original post.
