Supply and demand. Is this why Nintendo lowers the price so quickly on titles that don't sell 30 million+? All Nintendo games remain expensive for a long time, its always been like that, even slow movers in the N64 era cost full price for at least a couple of years. The simple fact is; Nintendo live solely off of their gaming division since they are in effect simply a gaming division while MS and Sony have other divisions as well and thus are quicker to release Classics and Platinum titles after a certain amount of sales to keep the games momentum going. Only makes sense, selling games cheaper will net you a bigger customer base, you sell more DLC, more people play online and more people potentially buy your sequels. Your attach rate also goes up greatly, the HD consoles have better attach rates despite the hardware being more costly throughout the generation. Its a perfectly sound strategy.
Selling 5 million units at 40-50%% retail price nets a bigger overall profit than selling 1 million at 90% retail price, that is also basic economics (just as an example). Its kind of the same as Nintendo refusing to lower the price of the Wii when the sales started declining, claiming that "price doesn't matter", as did some of their staunchest defenders. Yet they were forced to in order to halt the decline after a while and face the facts; price does matter. All Nintendo titles would sell more if they cost less, a lower price increases the demand even more, this is also very basic economics, even for people on internet boards.
Personally, I find it atrocious that Nintendo wants to force me to pay almost full price for aging titles if I decide to purchase a Wii and get some of the backlog and greatest hits. Its not a very consumer friendly policy in my humble opinion.
