Its all about compelling software.

Games sell systems. If there is nothing worthwhile there to buy, then people wont be interested no matter how much you cut the price.

Having a bit longer to advertise your cut obviously helps somewhat, but if you have no new games releasing around the time of your pricecut then you aint gonna do nuthin'. Youll have a small bump and sales will go back to (Or slightly higher than) pre-cut numbers.

Vita skyrocketing.

Disney Infinity opened nicely on the Wii U. Relatively impressive opening considering the install based compared to PS3/360. Hopefully, this bodes well for games like Rayman, Sonic Lost World, Lego Marvel, and so on. Blacklist was actually not quite as bad as I feared. I mean, it's still pretty bad, but considering I didn't see it on store shelves, I was expecting worse. Opened at about double what Need for Speed did. It might hit about 100K which may make the game somewhat profitable. Dunno what the cost of these ports are.

Actually pretty good for Vita guys. It's been trending at 4,000 all summer in America. This price drop doubled that.

Vita lower this week than Dragon's Crown week in NA. Yeah...

Call it blind optimism, but I'm gonna wait for NPD like usual.  I'm expecting terrible, but at least believable terrible (i.e. more than a week where a niche game from a niche genre by a niche developer boosted hardware.  It's probably the DC week which is wrong, though).

~ 50k using the figures Ubisoft gave for launch titles, to break even.

$100million well spent.

Do you have a link to that?  Not doubting you, just would like to read it.

Oh, Splinter Cell...

Had a feeling this game wouldn`t do well. Never thought it would do this bad. But, if it ends up actually appearing in stores, it could at least break even and make some profit.

Uff.  I did a whole post explaining it a very long time ago.  I'll do the tl;dr version here:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-23-ubisoft-says-wii-u-ports-costing-under-USD1-3-million

$1.3 million Wii-U ports for Ubisoft.

Anatomy of videogame costs - $27 to publisher.

Assuming all copies are sold for $60 (I think they will be, since it'll be the publisher selling them to the retailer) then it would be 48,148 copies if the numbers worked out exactly.  I just rounded this up to ~ 50k to make it easier to read.

The flaw to this is that Ubisoft carpet bombed that $1.3 million figure for all their launch title ports.  Those games ranged from Just Dance to Assassin's Creed.  I'm sure, as you can imagine, Assassin's Creed would probably cost significantly more to port than Just Dance.  I'd imagine Splinter Cell is much closer to AC level than JD; but as $1.3m is the only number we have to work with, that's what I use.