Would You Buy a Wii U at a Lower Price?

[wangjingwanjia]

cheshirescat said:

wangjingwanjia said:
As much as I love the Wii U, and already own one, a price tag of $150 would suit it much better.

Most likely to a big loss for Nintendo, but to be more realistic the Wii U does not compete with PS4 and X1, it's not as powerful and mainstream as they are.

So with a price tag of $150 they would compete more with the PS3 and X360 and place themselves in-between the two generations, kind of.

A price tag of $150 would absolutely attract more buyers, because it's a very low price for a next gen console, which the Wii U is. And everyone into gaming knows that Mario, Zelda etc. are good games. Everyone in the world, even if they don't play games knows who Mario is. So I think that a lot of people would buy it if the price was very attractive.

And a lot of parents would buy it too of course, because it's much cheaper and new.

But, Nintendo would make a great loss, right?

Well, when I pondered whether nintendo were willing to do a price cut I was thinking maybe $50, as that would be akin to cautiously dipping their toes back into the red in order to help hardware sales in the long run.  What made me sceptical being that the wii u purportedly no longer selling at a loss nintendo may be hesitant to implement a cut given the losses they've faced in the past few years, which could stunt the systems potential growth.  $150 though is simply suicidal, while the consumer would naturally welcome it the operating loss would be staggering, investors would be pissed and stock would most assuredly plummet.

Very true I would imagine. I don't really have any clue what the actual production cost of the Wii U is today, but since it's selling quite few that will also push up the production costs, even if their hardware is weaker and therefor cheaper than the cometition. So I imagine you are very spot on there.

They could perhaps lower it to $200, if they knew the console would explode and sell at massive numbers, thus bringing the production cost down. But I don't think it would sell that well. :( So a $100 price cut would not work if favour to Nintendo, and a $150 price cut suggested by me would absolutely piss off investors.

And Nintendo doesn't really have any significant hardware that they can remove from the console to sell a "budget" version either, like MS could do with X1 if they really wanted. They could remove the Kinect. The Wii U is already gimped enough.

I don't think there's really any other way than to sell the console at a loss, more so bigger than smaller, to actually increase the numbers as much as I want it to sell.

If Nintendo manages to sell 50+ million this generation I am very pleased, but, I do have some serious doubts they will. 30+ will be okay, but lower than that I will actually feel sad.