HAHA, I love Pachter

PS3 gotta price cut and redesign, of course there will be a spike.  What Avinash is saying is hardware momentum is maintained via software.

When is Pachter ever right? Why is he ever quoted?

I am really surprised - I never paid much attention and always thought his name was Patcher.

Man, Pachter should retire. He's been so wrong so many times. The PS3 needed a price cut because its sales were reaching some very low numbers. 360 had a price cut to keep it competitive against the PS3 and maintain its market share.

The Wii is so far ahead that they can go the rest of this gen without a price cut and still be the top seller for home consoles this gen.

I agree that they would be idiotic to ride out what potentially could be an excellent holiday season. Maybe better than last year's, but that would have to factor in the extra supply on the market off-setting the general decline in interest, and the question of software is a wildcard, because NSMBWii could potentially follow in the footsteps of City Folk, in the sense that it's already a DS game that enough people have, and it doesn't differentiate enough on Wii

Most likely NSMBWii will do fine, but we'll see how that translates to hardware...

The thought of that is... scary.   lol!

Why would Nintendo need to cut the price,there selling 150k units a week at $250

Yeah Wii still sold more software, even when you don't count wii Sports and Wii play, this clearly shows that the PS3 sales don't have momentum, rather this is a temp sales spike which will fall away pretty soon

Now, I'm not a professional analyst like Patcher is, but I think a price drop in November could be a huge mistake.
If it does well, there could be huge shortages all around, and it could lead to a loss for the quarter if their parts haven't dropped at all in price. It's possible that the Wii is already at a very cheap price for them, as they've pretty much already hit their economy of scale and are meanwhile using older hardware. As proof I'll remind you of when the Japanese Yen was really strong. At that point Nintendo said it was losing I think 20-30$ on each wii. At a 15-20% increase on the yen, that means they were making probably 10-15$ on each wii sold, and I think that is backed up in several places.

Now, if the wii has been only making 10-15$ nearly 45M units into the lifecycle, and have also been making a profit since the beginning, then it means that the wii has only dropped maybe 10 dollars in parts pricing over that much time, reinforcing the idea that the hardware is older and already very mainstream.

A better idea would be to drop the price in feb or march to keep up sales after the holidays and at the same time, supplement the loss with the holiday sales. It also helps that there are some good wii games coming out in 2010 as well.