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Soundwave on 11 June 2015
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zorg1000 said:
Soundwave said:

The Wii U probably should be $250 by now, but the issue is the sales are so poor at the launch price (which wasn't outrageous) that they can't leverage economies of scale to drop the price. Their parts suppliers are likely not willing to give them any leeway on component costs because the thing is selling like a donkey turd. 

Which is more of a demand issue, not really one of price, the NES/SNES/N64 all sold well enough (inflation accounted for) at their launch prices to allow for price drops later on. 

3DS has had price cuts and cheaper model revisions and frequent temporary cuts too. 

That and Nintendo learned from the GameCube that just blindly slashing the price to the bare minimum doesn't neccessarily do anything except a temporary boost in sales. So I think with Wii U they're content to finish at 18 million but not lose any more money on hardware than need be, rather than cut to $200 or $250 and maybe sniff GameCube-level sales. I think they're basically said "we give up on this gen" knowing they have a turkey on their hands. 

It's a fun system, but lets face it, the moment Nintendo lost the Wii Sports/Wii Fit gamer (largely women to smart devices) the market realities for a console wearing the "Wii" brand dimmed very, very significantly. Nintendo probably feels like since only Nintendo hardcore fans are going to buy a Wii U anyway, that's it's really not worth dropping the price to maybe grab a few extra stragglers who own a PS4-XBox One but just need to have Splatoon or Mario Kart in their life.  

They're probably not wrong either. I think suffering the first fiscal losses in company history to cut the 3DS price and then going into a tailspin of several consecutive years of losses also really did a number on the psyche of Nintendo's management. They did it for 3DS, but they weren't gonna do that again, even if it means the Wii U is going to drown to death. 


SNES/N64/GC all received price cuts within the first 6-9 months so I'm not sure u can say their initial sales were strong at their launch prices.

I'm not saying Nintendo should do massive price cuts now since they would likely lose a lot of money, what I'm saying is that Nintendo should have designed their hardware so that they could scale down in price at a reasonable rate and not lose money in the process.

Wii U is still at its initial launch price 2.5 years later although with some extra value packed in. Outside of releasing a bare bones sku in 2DS, the price of 3DS/3DS XL has remained the same for nearly 3-4 years depending on model, instead they have again added value with the "New" upgrade. These devices essentially cost the same as they did in 2012, that's unacceptable and as I've pointed out in the late 90s/early 00s it literally cost 1/2 as much to own Nintendo hardware even when adjusted for inflation.


Nintendo generally hasn't cut the price of their handhelds too much. The DS actually went down in price briefly but then went back up in price with the DS Lite. 

$300 isn't really that expensive. The XBox 360 and PS3 sold tens of millions of units at roughly that price. So I mean we can make tons of excuses for the Wii U, but the fact is for a modern game machine in 2010s, the system just isn't getting it done sales wise. 

The fact is too, most people passed on the GCN, lets not paint it as some kind of success just because the GBA was one, no, GCN failed miserably short of Nintendo's own expectations for it which was 50 million units on the low end. 

If anything too, the cheap price for the N64 and GCN probably was overblown, they would have been far better off launching the N64 at $250 (which was the originally announced price) and adding a CD-drive to the system. With the GameCube they would've probably been better off supporting full sized DVDs and DVD movie playback with more RAM and started at $250 too. 

Since Sony has entered the business, you can't really get away with just selling a system on the merit of "well it's dirt cheap mom and dad!", because Sony offers for the most fairly high end consoles at a reasonable price point, aside from the PS3's first year on the market. So Nintendo trying to play the "we have cheap hardware" card has been falling on deaf ears for the better part of 20 years now. 

Inflation plays a role on both the high end and low end of pricing too ... $199.99 has become what $99.99 used to be, the PS3 is still $199.99 MSRP brand new and it's going on nine years old.