Whoa, didn't notice it was your writeup. Good job, it looks like something that a pro would write :)

But, it's true.  This is for both new (female, especially) entrants into the franchise with the pokécare? (whatever it was called) and social elements.

Thanks. It just popped into my head after I looked at the X boxart and thinking "This Pokemon doesn't look like it's about to kill something. That's odd"

Pokemon-amie by the way. Play on Mon-amie or my friend in french.

Nintendo wants to meet (or at the very least come relatively close to) their agressive profit target, they don´t need and shouldn´t cut the 3DS´s price.
A 40$ price cut would send the 3DS straight into the red zone and we all know how the infamous price cut affected Nintendo´s financials last year !

Oui, je parle Français un petit peu But I am also somewhat ignorant, having not played Pokémon post-gen 2. I try to follow news/Pokémon topics so I can hype the girlfriend up. At least for her, X/Y is gonna be a system seller.

Pokémon amie is funny, given this whole female topic - amie is the female form of the word "friend", while the male one is "ami". Nintendo is proving you.

Pokemon wasn't really cool in high school, but I still bought the games.

RolStoppable has a good point however, that the charts may be inherently biased. I think boys may be more likely to register the games on Club Nintendo, and then even more likely to complete the surveys than girls. Since the survey is completely voluntary, it is already somewhat biased. Also important to know when looking at the data is the total amount of participants, as well as variance and such.

Good read. I feel as though the female audience came over with Animal Crossing and will pick up Pokemon next, though.

I do think we may see a bundle, 3DS XL with Pokemon for £170, or $199.

Nice article.

I agree with everything except the price cut.

I do think they are targeting the female audience more. As Conegamer said Animal Crossing (and I'd add Tomodochi in Japan) has picked up a huge female audience for 3DS so it makes sense to appeal more broadly. In a totally unscientific experiment I showed my 5.5 year old daughter the two pictures of X/Y. She loved the "deer with rainbow antlers". She like the other but said it was a "giant" and more "scary" although she like the rainbow behind it (as she put it - more of a multi-colored background). But she was definitely more drawn to the X. Don't have a boy to try the opposite but I know when I was 5.5 I would have picked Y hands down as being more "cool" just like I always liked the bad guys in Star Wars that looked cool. Note that isn't strictly boy/girl but having a scary and elegant/majestic box art seems smart to attract different types of people.

Pokemon is also entering an interesting phase. Some of it's earliest players from 1996 that were say 12 when it was released are at the age where they start having kids. It's still the early phase of this for this franchise whereas Mario already went through that. In fact I think there was a large contingent of Wii buyers that grew up on Nintendo left for Playstation in high school/college and returned for Wii with their kids. I've enjoyed sharing games from my youth with my kids and I know my friends have as well. Sonic and others are going through that now too and seeing a resurgence. Nostalgia and sharing experiences is a powerful tool and I'm sure Nintendo will take advantage of that in full with Pokemon. I know if I had grown up a Pokemon player I'd want to share it with my daughters and having a more appealing version can only help so long as the gameplay remains excellent.

As for price I don't think cutting $40 would push enough extra units to be warranted. If you assume they make $10 net per game sold they'd have to sell 4 additional new games per 3DS sold to break even which is around where the current attach rate is. I think they'd be better off creating a great bundle with some nice sales around Black Friday to ensure they get full pricing from those that will buy a 3DS at launch just for X/Y and won't wait for the holiday season. Then sell a ton around the holidays with great bundles and sales.

It's still down YoY so far. 2012 holidays had nothing for the 3DS.

(Well we had Paper Mario Sticker Star)

2013 will be different sure, but they need more software sales right now.

The amount of big sellers is too big for a price drop this year.

Im guessing next year will be kinda a slower year in terms of huge sellers and will focus a bit more on Wii U. A $30-40 price cut next year with a revision on the smaller model would be my guess.