Nintendo Expected To Drop GBA Price To $80US

cdneng2 writes "gamesindustry.biz has the scoop that Nintendo is dropping the GBA price down to $80 in North America later this week! The $20 cut is aimed to stimulate sales for the Christmas run-up. The article also indicated that DS is rumoured to sell for $179 US."

Comments

Emulation and piracy

[Kethinov]

I wouldn't be surprised if the drop in price also had something to do with an attempt to combat piracy of GBA roms due to widespread GBA emulation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge console emulation enthusiast and I've even pirated my fair share of ROMs. (Made a few of my own as well.) But the GBA is not a state of the art console. It's just another single threaded SNES except modern technology allows us to make it portable.

Modern emu programmers didn't have to deal with the enormous complexities involved in emulating N64 or Gamecube in writing a GBA emu, so a perfect emulation is achievable exponentially sooner.

So since GBA achieves high compatibility relatively early on the scene, new commercial games work in the emulator out of the box. If modern commercial games work in the emu out of the box, what point is there in buying the console?

Some people would respond with, "Portability, stupid!" But many people don't buy a GBA because it's portable but because it's the only platform with the games they want to play. (There are a number of excellent games for the GBA.)

I imagine this rapid early success of the GBA emu scene cuts into Nintendo's profits more subtantially than ever before.

Re:Emulation and piracy

[Kethinov]

On the surface yes. But look at from this perspective. By making the console cheaper they make emulation less appealing. The more sales of the console, the more sales of games, regardless of game price. Once you sell'm the console, they'll buy your games.

The real reason

[Mike Hawk]

The cut is designed to create fully distinct markets for the DS and SP. If they were anywhere close in price non-bleeding edge consumers would choose the SP everytime due to its familiarity and broad range of titles. The price gap demonstrates that the DS is the new and the flashy and the SP is the old and busted, relatively speaking only, of course. Nintendo does not want the DS to appear to be a one-trick side project in the marketplace. Only time will determine if that is true or not. With the PSP turning out to be significantly more powerful and having the PlayStation name, wow, this is going to be fun!

As an interesting side point, whats with Nintendo running around bitching about other companies accelerating the console race when they are putting this out only a year from the launch of the SP in Japan? Hell even the GBA vanilla launched only 3 years ago. The abandonment of the GBA so quickly, IMHO, is really a slap in the face to everyone who bought a GBA.

Re:The real reason

[blueZhift]

Interesting. I had wondered what this price drop for the SP would do to the plain ol' GBA. You never even see the original GBA in the ads anymore. I wonder if Nintendo is even making GBA's. It's too bad really, because all the original GBA really needed was a backlit screen. I like my SP just fine, but it's easier to grip the original GBA.

As for the fast turnover though, I don't think that has hurt Nintendo all that much in the Japanese market. In Japan, consumers tend to get bored with things faster than in North America. So companies are always trying to come out with new things relatively quickly. Nintendo's NES styled SP and accompanying NES re-releases have been a big hit in Japan, but has met with less success in NA.

Re:The real reason

[Colazar]

The amount of consumers willing to pay 80 but not 100 is insignificant and not worth repricing a whole product line towards, and that niche is not really the target anyway, since if they are that cheap they will not likely be making considerable purchases of any type.

Well...depends. In my house, this might make a difference. $80 puts it in the range of "affordable gift for children" ($70 would be *tons* better, for some reason). Since the idea is to sell games (which have a lower price point) I think theres a decent amount of money to be made in the casual market, just by getting people into the platform. But I'm not in the industry, so the market might skew more heavily towards hard-core users than I think.

Also consider that traditionally once a system drops below 100 in price, the manufacturer is getting out of that business.

I believe that about consoles, but is that true with handhelds as well? I'd expect handhelds to be stable at a slightly lower price. (And this $80, may well be it.) As I recall we got our kids their GBC when it was at end-of-life, which I thought was around $50.

As suspected

[focitrixilous P]

Nintendo has said that the DS is intended as a 3rd platform for the company, and they plan to actively devlop for GBA for a while yet. Also, the DS is confirmed to be backwards compatable with GBA games, so people who splurge on a DS can get the presumably cheaper GBA games. The DS is shaping up to be pretty cool, and I most likely will replace my original GBA with it as a christmas present (either from someone, or to myself... Why couldn't I have rich grandparents like everyone else.) Anyhow, this is an attempt to split the market into two groups, with different game prices for each group.

Re:My first first post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so sure. Nintendo does a lot of marketing research and they know that there's a large section of faithful customers that will buy their new gadgets at any nominal price point. If they can sell 10,000 units at a $40 profit, they'll do that well before they sell 30,000 units at only $10 profit.