| Plaupius said: I think it is safe to say that they can not compete with Nintendo on price, Wii will always be cheaper to produce than X360 or PS3, so what can they do that would improve their chances? Pretty much the only options they have are to try to lower the perceived value of Wii through marketing / capturing 3rd party developers from Nintendo, and trying to increase the perceived value of their own console. Is it possible? Yes. Is it realistic? Probably not. |
I think it's safe to say that the perceived value of the Wii was bigger than the 2 others from day one.
And that the other two tried to decrease the perceived value of the Wii before it even launched. They were small attacks before the Wii launch, because they thought it was dead on arrival, and this was just the nail in the coffin. But as soon as the Wii started to win, they attacked full force.
MS especially is well known for its viral marketing, heavy astroturfing and army of shills. They started to appear everywhere on the Web less than 3 months after Wii launch. But the Wii is so amazing, the Nintendo marketing was so good, that even without defending themselves, the MS shills never succeeded in lowering its value.
And if you have good memory, you can remember lots of attacks against the Wii, like the "it breaks your expensive HDTV" campaign, which was one of the more efficient ones, or the "Nintendo had to recall all the wiimotes because they are defective". All of these attacks appear like nonsense when you've played the system.
So the question is: did all these attacks work? The answer is NO! Thank god!
And Nintendo did that with their 1st party games alone. Which is obvious when you read all the comments about 3rd party games. But I've no doubt that when hopefully decent 3rd party support all around takes off, you will have people saying that the success of the Wii was thanks to 3rd party support, like some say now about the DS. Consequency mistaken for causality.
As for price, I'm still pretty convinced that even if the other two went below the Wii price, the Wii would still sell better. The other two will avoid at all costs going below the Wii price: that would be a sign of failure, and would send this very message to consumers. How can you say the Wii is low power, base your marketing on power, and yet sell your console cheaper than the one everyone want so much so that there are constant shortages? To
the consumer, that means it's the inferior product in this case.
Perceived value is all that counts: if you're more expensive, it's too expensive! If you're cheaper, you are a cheap product! For the uneducated mass market that is.
