^^yet you have no clue how much the new chips or slim could reduce the price by. @Rol, my community may be messed up, but every Wii owner I know of in my highschool say that they bought a Wii b/c it was cheap.

One thing I hope for in the future is that ALL the consoles start out at bout the same range for a price point, cause then the sales discussion can be on whats the deal is, Marketing & Strategy, lol.

...My opinion is that must like the price cut that the XB360 had a PS3 cut will have fading effects, BUT it should at LEAST stop the bleeding.

This makes it even more clear to me the reason for XB360&PS3's motion control announcements. They need to compete, not just for this gen, but the current as well. Graphic has proven not to be the difference maker that the two companies banked on...

Gamer, what type of effect do you think FFCC: The Cyrstal Bearers will have on the Wii? One thing is for certain, Nintendo isn't going into this 4Q unprepared, with 3rd parties bring in more assistance then before...

^^maybe, maybe

but we can make assumptions on cost reduction based on past performance for similar actions. if you look historically PPC based chips (the cell is a member of that family being built of notes and tech from the AIM alliance) there has always been a problem with new fabs and size reduction, in some cases taking over a year to work out the issues, normally though about 6 moths, and they never ever ever reach thermal reduction predictions there is always more heat being thrown off the chips then anticipated. failure rates remain very high for the first 6 months generally killing any cost savings (though it does come eventually)

see PPC75X (the wiis chip is a decedent ) PPC74XX  PPC 970,  power series 1-4      all of the information and knowledge gained in making these varius chips went into making the cell and xenon.

and im willing to bet both will have issues with die shrinks, and greater then expected heat.

it is interesting to see that nintendo has not announced a die shrink considering they have the larger chip, and die shrinks on its family are are ready further along, not to mention, its family has dual cores and higher clock speeds it could have used already in production.  but with out real white papers on the chip who knows maybe they switched to the ppc74XX line which in completely compatible with the ppc75X and increases performance significantly at the same clockspeed 

360 was killed in sales worldwide by the PS3 before last september price cut, and I doubt it will be different when Sony cuts the price (probably in August).

As raf pointed out, the main reason why the 360 is doing better this year is its price : it's half the PS3 price, but doesn't manage to sell better than the PS3 right now worldwide, so it's hardly a great success for MS.

$349 will cause a raise of around 30%

But that's based on old numbers before the recession. It'll also be the price that would achieve the highest amount of revenue if all other trends remained the same.

Here's my calculations: http://vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=44155&page=1

It's age-old, now.

Usual sales bump for a week or two and decent software sales but nothing major.  It's not the main series FF but if the games proves really good it might give the Wii a small prolonged sales increase of 1-2k.  DQX when it comes out, would be much more significant.

What does YoY mean?

Year over Year = YoY. I.E. one year compared to the previous or next.