Direct but poor competition is not the same as not having competition. Please don't take this as a disparagement against the PS3 or 360, for most of the core audience the Wii is no substitute for them either.

If this is true, Nintendo had best really market this. Speaking of which, have you guys been seeing any Wii commercials at all lately?

I notice that sentiment around here as well...

I quoted the wrong post. My apologies.

There has never been and there never will be a game console that never declines in price.

Even the NES got price cuts and it had like 95% market share (lol). 

It's also a ridiculous assertion to expect any company to be able to to just wave their magic wand and deliver a game that sells 10+ million copies every six months. Sony or Microsoft or Sega can't do that, Nintendo can't either. There's nothing wrong with a price after almost three years, lol, on the market. 

It's not like you get some kind of special cookie for waiting 4 years instead of 3 to cut the price. 

It also shows to me that Mr. Iwata is much more flexible and in tune with the market than Mr. Yamauchi was. Yamauchi is the one who could become fixated on certain arbitrary rules, Iwata is interested in marketshare. If you don't have marketshare or you're bleeding marketshare and you've lost brand momenteum as well ... Nintendo learned the hard way with the GameCube that it can impact your overall profits. 

""POOR PEOPLE ENJOYING MY HOBBY?  I DONT THINK SO!""

Not that the Wii needs a price cut to sell the most of the 3 consoles, this is needed to push the Wii over 50% market share.  It does make getting a second one more tempting. 

The $200 is a much better impule price point then $249.  Plus it's been out long enough that I'm sure they saved at least $50 in manufacturing costs.

I'll preface this by saying i don't really know much about it but i find the blue ocean talk a little tiring a times. The assertion that Nintendo needs to increase the value of the Wii (via software for example) and not decrease the price of the hardware is a wonderful notion and obviously has some merit, but surely it has limits.

Let's say Ferrari wants to increase sales of their cars so they decide to work on increasing the value of the car and people's reasons for purchasing it rather than just dropping the price. No matter what they do to increase the perceived value of the car, I and alot of other people are still not going to drop 200k on a car, i just couldn't justify it.

Now while the Wii is at a significantly lower price point there are people out there (even among the core group that is represented on this site) that are not willing to drop 250 dollars on a Wii, regardless of the merits of its software library. For these people the only thing that may work is a price drop below a point where they can think, i CAN justify spending that much money on a gaming device.The only question is whether the number of potential consumers you earn by dropping the price point offsets the losses in profit.

The other factor that people seem to fail to consider when talking about the Blue Ocean strategy as it pertains to the Wii, is time scale. Increasing the perceived value of the Wii by providing must have software takes time, a long time, whereas a pricecut can be initiated relatively quickly. Perhaps Nintendo isn't willing to wait for the continuing low-ish sales of the Wii to persist for several more months while resting their hopes on software that ultimately may not drive hardware sales.

Banking on a blockbuster game release every six months to keep sales at an insane level is not even a feasible business strategy to begin with.

No game company can just pump out a 10 million seller at the snap of a finger, not even Nintendo and certainly not Sony or Microsoft.

That's like a film director to make every movie he makes a giant blockbuster or the studio will go under and lose financial momenteum. Not even Steven Spielberg could make that studio work under those parameters.

Price cuts, new colors, bundles, etc. have their place just as much as big software releases.

Damn, now my bet fails...(maybe)