By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
teigaga on 22 October 2016
Edit Thread
Lawlight said:
teigaga said:

Was selling around 80-100k for a while. Hit as low as 30k right before the price cut. It had a bad launch line up and huge games drought (only offset by a remake-Ocarina of time). 3DS support was worse than Wii U for its first  9months. 

 

Nintendogs+cats and Steeldiver were the first party games it was selling off. Street Fighter V was the big third party game.

If Nintendo thought that the library was the issue they would have waited 3 more months for Mario 3D Land and a further month for Mario Kart to come out. They knew that people didn't want a $249 handheld.

Several things come into play.

- The 3DS was always seen as expensive. It's $250 pricetag was met with confusion considering many games looked only slightly better then the 6 year old PSP and all Nintendo's previous systems were sold for far less.

-The PSVita was announced for the same price as the 3DS despite boasting superior specs. The month after this Nintendo dropped the price. 

-When you're selling like trash and have a $180 system you're pushing at $250 you dont just sit tight through 3 months of abysmal sales leading up to the holiday. Nintebdo wanted to give the 3DS as much momentum as possible to compensate for the poor start. It didn't recieve another price cut for a long time and they were comfortable enough to launch the XL for $200.

- They did the same early life price cut with Wii U to very little avail. Sony cut the PSVita to $200 and it still sold poorly. Price cuts are generic responses to poor sales. More then looking at it as arbitrary as "this form of device -portable or home console- can't sell for x amount" look specifically at what it offers in context of the market. PSP sold very well at $250 because what it offered to the market at thar moment in time. NS is extremely different in terms of what it offers when compared to the 3DS. If we do care to compare it to the 3DS, we can't ignore the 3DS launch combo of mediocre hardware, an unsuccessful gimmick (3D), terrible software line up (Steeldiver/Nintendogs for 6months) and Premium price tag. You can't just pinpoint the pricetag. Price tag however is the only thing they can change on the fly.