| NinjabreadMan said: Surprisingly enough I own a Wii. Most people have read only my original post, which i'll admit wasn't a very good statement of how it is. Still, my main gripe is with no intention of reducing the price over time like the traditional model of console business. It's true that this can be done to stimulate sales when demand falls, and demand for Wii certainly hasn't fallen. Was the model for the Wii designed around a potential low sale scenario? It could be this, and thus would allow Nintendo to still make a sizeable profit despite low numbers, ala GC. I'd be interested in knowing exactly how much Nintendo makes on each console sold, and whether or not the manufacturing costs have fallen very much since launch. I'd admit that Nintendo have done something useful in the form of developing the first decent motion controller for main stream consoles, but i'm still not happy with the machine itself. At the end of the day, it's fantastic for the business, but no so great for the consumers in my view - even if they are willing to pay inflated costs on eBay etc. Clearly there must be excess demand that Nintendo is not tapping into at the moment. I'd like to see someone post something to do with the Economics that doesn't resemble the "if demand falls, price will fall" argument I see here. It's not totally explained by this. |
Price drops aren't the kind of thing you talk about. You do them, or you don't. If you talk about them, sales immediately drop as potential buyers speculate about the forthcoming price drop. Now, you have to drop the price to move the production that was selling fine before you started blabbing about price.
So Nintendo will deny the probability of any price drop, right up until they drop the price. It will happen eventually, but likely not this year. It doesn't serve Nintendo's interests to sell a limited number of Wiis at a high price when they could make more money selling software to a larger userbase.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
