Your sarcasm hurts Tim. If you don't who Tim is, then that hurts me.

Anyway, why use sarcasm. Since he picked up on something then theres something to talk about with the Wiis sales like Will they get a price cut?

I think we should be talking about whether WM+ and accompanying games will be big system sellers... because Nintendo won't even think about cutting prices before seeing the effect of those.

I think a price cut is likely in Japan, it's very unlikely in the rest of the world except if it was to happen very late in the financial year ( February 2010?)).

The reason being that Nintendo forecasts identical revenue with higher profit margin for the fiscal year 2010 and price cut tend to drop the profit margin ( that and most likely less Wii Fit will be sold in 2010 than in 2009 and it's probably one of their other high profit margin product..). Especially when you see they forecast their marketing budget will increase slightly too.

You can't cut price, increase marketing and end up making higher profit margins...

But wouldn't Wii M+ be like a price rise? Seeing as you're adding an accessory which raises the total cost of the console by x$ to take advantage of it? But anyway you're probably right, and I hate that! Wheres Tim? I need Tim.

@Squilliam: Lol :P

BTW I wasn't calling it either way. The effect of WM+ on sales is a mystery to me... until a Star Wars lightsaber game comes out that is ;)

The only things Nintendo has done to stimulate demand so far is release games and release peripherals. For whatever reason, they've lapsed on the regular releases of games and peripherals, so they're not going to make any moves until they see how Wii Sports Resort, Monster Hunter 3, etc. perform.

And if those fail to stimulate the market, I think they'll look at new SKUs with redesigns and/or bundles before they cut price.

Ail the Wii software market is 193m in the Americas vs 34m in Japan. That is what is preventing a western slowdown. The entire NES/DS market for the Americas was 230m/205m. Wii is going to obliterate those figures for software and that will continue to ensure that games which take advantage of the western software base will continue to be developed. The problem is games aimed at western audiences rarely perform well in Japan, even when made by Japanese developers, so the Wii software situation in Japan is likely to remain dire, at least until Monster Hunter 3 and Dragon Quest X begin rounding it out as a third party hit machine in the way the big hits from Activision, EA, Sega, Ubisoft and Capcom have helped Wii in the west.

The hardware ratio is 23,000,000 to 8,000,000 in the Americas to Japan despite the slowdown in Japan recently. If Wii in Japan had PS2 like support among Japanese developers the Americas to Japan SW ratio would be only 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than in the west, instead of ~six times larger.

There are at least 10 more million selling Wii games (Mario & Sonic, Wii Sports Resort, EA Active, Punch Out, Guitar Hero V, DJ Hero, Beatles: Rockband, Red Steel 2, the Rayman comedy adventure, Tiger Woods, Wii Fit Plus if it exists) in the west this year, Japan has at most 3 (Wii Fit + if it exists?, Wii Sports Resort, Monster Hunter 3).

Star wars!

Im going to see the new Star Trek today... !!!!!!!! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG. Imagine Kirk brawling game with Wii M+?!?!?!?!?! OMG Awesome, gotta be the #1 system selling WM+ game ever! =)))))

They've set themselves up with an increase in production to current levels, if they cannot maintain demand at that level then the only thing which would work is a price cut. Im sure they will wait, but this is the level that sales really have to be maintained at, so a price cut would probably be the last resort since they have spent so much time/effort expanding production to these levels.

I actually do not predict a slow down in Wii software sales, only in hardware and my estimate is only for 2009 calendar year to be down 10% YoY compared to 2008 ( and probably the same for the fiscal year).

I still will disagree with applying the same paradigm most people use for HD consoles to the Wii ( core software will sell hardware..). Core software will sell well , that's it...( and the drought in decent Wii software will help the next Nintendo titles to be released to do even better).