It's not odd at all. Sales have consistently been down YoY and at those rates, Nintendo had absolutely no chance at all of hitting their hardware sales projections.

They dropped price by $50, and lo and behold, sales went up by 100% in the NA market. The real question is whether renewed interest from the sub $200 consumers will result in Nintendo hitting its projections for the year.

Well the price haven't been a problem for Wii and pricecuts do increase sales for a while on any product.

What the pricecut is about, is to phase out the existing systems that Nintendo has in its warehouses, so that the sales packages will eventually be replaced with WSR/Motion Plus included in the package. In similar fashion NES eventually had SMB and Duck Hunt with Zapper in the sales package.
You should be talking about pricecut once the Wii Sports package is phased out, replaced with WSR pack and that package is sold at 200.

Even though $250 is not necessarily alot of money for many people there are always going to be additional people that will be attracted by a lower price, the question is just how many.

As an example $200 now puts the Wii in the range of disposable income that i have in a single week, making it a more likely impulse purchase for me, i.e. something i don't have to save for.

No, I meant that I wish the Wii was $200 at launch. Since I'm very poor. lol It was worth over the 250 I paid for it. I have over 10,000 hours on it probably. I meant that it's odd that even though I wish the price was $200 at launch, I still don't think they should have lowered it down $50 from 250. That just seems odd to me that I would think that. But I dunno.

who would know more that Nintendo whether or not they should drop?! I mean when ur sales decline by 50% YoY, it's a huge problem

Price was never prohibitive, no. Nintendo just needed a price-cut to excite the market at a time when their software plans had rather fallen through (though we'll never know, will we? Sales were back up for August, after all. They could have kept pushing)

This's actually a good point. I don't understand why Nintendo didn't reconsidered its software policies about launch, hype and info. Excitebots was announced 1 month before release and they only 2 first party games for the Wii this season.

I have always found the wii to be an enigma.

I really couldn't believe how such a low spec machine totally hammered the competition (more so the x360 due to its competitive pricing) simply by being a so called "casual" motion sensing console.

Hence I initially thought a price cut was pointless, regardless what the other two did.

Was a price cut necessary? Nintendo obviously thought so and with that in mind who am I or anyone else to argue.

They have been around for a century, rarely - if ever been in the red, and have billions in the bank. You don't get to be in this position if you don't know what you doing.

No company is perfect and will make mistakes but with such a background as Nintendo's I will have to accept they did the right thing. Time as always, will tell.

Personally wii games (or the lack of) that interest me are few.

WSR is the first and only wii game I bought this year (I think that I have bought about 10 games this year).

So hence I conclude that:

1) There just isn't enough big releases to sustain the rate the wii was selling.

2) For a long time wii was selling well riding on the back on wii fit, MK etc., (maybe WSR will take up this role but I don't see it being a wii fit).

3) These games (wii fit, MK etc.,) are now slowly dropping down the charts so I think a price cut was necessary to push wii sales on.

What Nintendo does next is anyones guess.

It makes you wonder if something happened at the Big N HQ in Tokyo. 

It could be that third-parties backed away from what was expected while some internal plans changed (see Malestrom's comments regarding user-generated content).

Finally, it appears the price cut made a difference -- and will make even more of a difference. I was at a Wal-Mart yesterday. At the beginning of the week, the Wal-Mart I went to did not even have the price cut marked. By Sunday, there were none in stock (two different stores but in the same town).

Mike for Morgantown

@Alfredofroylan: Umm... The hype part isn't the issue, but the lack of releasing system sellers. Hype doesn't do any good if the hype doesn't turn into games.
2006, Wii Sports and Twilight Princess were propably the biggest system sellers to drive the momentum.
2007, the minigame collections released in the first half propably proved out to be the system sellers until Super Mario Galaxy.
2008, we saw Wii Fit, Mario Kart Wii and Brawl to push system sales. What was released in Q4, Animal Crossing and Wii Music, bombed hard as system sellers, so the momentum was lost.
2009, the new play control games didn't sell systems and it took almost the first half of the year before Wii Sports Resort came out, that had the potential and now Nintendos next shot is New Super Mario Bros. Wii.