Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo's Iwata on the Wii Price Point
kukyfrope writes "Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President, recently talked with GameDaily about the rumors surrounding the $249 Wii price point, his take of the PS3 price point and controller, and to reassure us that the GameBoy is far from dead! 'You may want to check our past records of price points when launching past hardware... I think you'll agree that we always come up with an affordable price point.'"
You may want to check our past records of price points when launching past hardware.
Okay. 200 bucks it is then. I'm in.
This guy's the limit!
It won't be $25 at a yard sale yet either. Seriously, with the computing power that is put into these we should be paying a lot more.
sudo mod me up
Iwata laughed at the very idea that the Wii could be released for $250 and tells the journalist to do his homework and realize that Nintendo's release price point has been fixed at $200 for the past 20 years for every single non-portable console.
Seriously, who even cares about that, the Wii will be $200 or less period, and no one gives a fuck about the price unless we have the actual ability to buy it.
Oh, and I'd be much more interrested by the potential price point of the games, because what I'll save by having a Wii over an XBox or a PS3 i'll more than likely blow in games.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Most of the interview is not about the price point. When he does talk about it, he only says that he can't talk about it.
In case anyone is out of the loop here, all of Nintendo's main consoles have retailed or US$199. You can draw your own conclusions from there.
"... and when we say affordable, you may want to check our past records of price points, launching price points for any past hardware."
The NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube all launched at $199.99.
$250? Yea that sounds like the good ol days when Super Nintendo cost 200 at launch. And if you want to adjust for inflation I bet its about even. If thats the price, Nintendo will definatly appeal to those with less money. A smaller investment in the hardware leaves you with more money to purchase software which IMHO is way more important then the console. I know a kid who spent 800 on his 360 at launch and didnt have any money left for a single game. He just played his old xbox games for a month before he had enough saved up to buy a 360 game.
Even if they do raise the price, it won't be for over 250. Sure some people may pay more than that at launch (ebayers) but retail will not be over 250. And that's the biggest selling point nintendo has. Their consoles have never been cutting edge. They haven't needed to be to be fun to play.
Most people who buy the Wii will do so because of the controller, not the price. In the case of the PS3, most people will buy it because it will have the widest selection of games out of the new consoles. A lot of people bought the 360 because it was the first next-gen console to be released.
This isn't to say that plenty of people will buy one or more of the consoles because they like the brand or own the previous generations of it or that some people will make their decisions based on price. IMO, price is not the driving factor behind purchasing a console.
I own well over 50 PS2 games (I really don't know how many, but that is a low estimate), 20 Nintendo 64 games, 20 Xbox games, 50 PSOne games, 50 SNES games, and I probably have 20 or so NES games stuffed in a box somewhere. If I buy just 20 games for a system at $50 a game, that comes out to be $1000. For the PS3's low model, the system plus 20 games comes out to be $1500, while the Wii, assuming the price for the system will be $200, with 20 games will be around $1200. I'm only paying 25% more for the PS3 with 20 games as opposed to paying 200% more if you just consider the systems without games. Yes, a $500 or $600 pricetag seems like a lot compared to $200, but as you buy more games, that initial investment means so much less. At 50 games for each console, the PS3 only costs 11% more.
All those games that I own add up to (assuming the average game cost me $30) $6300 where the consoles cost me no more than $1400. The consoles cost me roughly 18% of the money I have spent on video games, with the estimates I have provided (even though I didn't consider controllers, adapters, TVs, electricity, and anything else that might be related). Since I know the initial price of a console isn't a major factor in the long run, I don't think that it will affect people that much in the beginning either.
I'm sure nintendo knows what the competition plans on doing, and MS stated that they would drop the price of the 360 yearly, and they would be foolish not to do so in November with the ps3 arriving, even if it is only $20.
If the $299 core drops down to $250, it would be smart for nintendo to release the Wii at $200. I'm sure they could compete at $250, but a decent amount of hype regarding the Wii is about how cheap it is, so I'm sure they will stay cheaper than the competition.
On the other hand, if the core price doesn't drop (maybe only the premium will, $360 looks like a good number), then I think the Wii will sell just as many at $250 as they will at $200.
Oh yeah gameplay is alright but really does a Advance Wars Dual Strike deserve the same price point as an Oblivion?
I think that that is the real Nintendo success. That consumers so far are not objecting to paying full price for games for handheld games that have cost a fraction of the development costs.
With DS sales so high I can't help but feal DS developers are cleaning up.
I buy most of my games secondhand. 44.95 vs 12.50 makes a huge difference.
So very nice that the Wii will cost 249 or whatever. What I want to know is the price of games. That is the real kicker.
As for the whole idea of downloadable old games. Are they going to be priced the same as the handheld ports?
And since when does Nintendo have a reputation for being cheap? Just check out the hardware vs price cost of the new tiny GBA and a PSP. The PSP at the moment is only twice as expensive but surely it got two times the hardware inside?
Saying that nintendo consoles are cheap is like saying lada's are cheaper then volvo's. Well duh.
This is not a comment on their value as a gaming machine but price alone ain't everything. Nintendo has to be cheap because absolutly nobody would buy one at a higher price. The Wii has to be cheap. The PS3 can afford to be expensive (or so Sony hopes at least). Put another way, would you buy a Wii at 360 prices? No, didn't think so.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Do I pay per pixel or what's cooking here?
To put it even simpler: Texture artists and shader developers charge per texel, modelers charge per polygon, and coders who are new to threaded programming charge per concurrent core.
Everyone's talking about how the US price of Nintendo consoles have always been $199... but how about the Japanese price? Is it also a constant price point?
Do you think that, suppose they break their US -> $199 rule with the Wii, the Japanese price will have any effect?
1) It is much lower than the competition.
2) It is a figure consumers have been acclimated to in the past.
3) Microsoft is probably unlikely to drop the core system's price more than $50 to try and compete IMO, as such, $250 is not a safe price point as it could probably end up competing with the 360 Core System (Note that I don't think the Wii would be a better buy at $250 than the crippled XBOX 360, but I'm not the one Nintendo needs to convince, as I'm one of their avowed faithful)
4) $150, while exceptionally attractive, I don't think will be seen this early, that price is probably running dangerously close to Nintendo's Componenent Costs + Manufacturing + Shipping + Profit + Retailor Markup. I do definately think we'll see a $150 Wii within a 12-18 months however.
previous N consoles are ~$200
/and "dongsucker," really now, how immature can you be?
Iwata says look to past N console prices
GGP says it won't be $199
obtuse is slow to understand; hmm, sounds obtuse to me...
Reporter: So, what will the Wii cost? ...And that price is...?
Iwata: Well, it will have a price.
Reporter:
Iwata: Definately a rational number. Who knows, it could be a whole number!
Reporter: Do I need to break out the hangman board?
I want to know the price, but wild speculation and tight lips is just getting annoying, especially since we're probably only five months or so from launch.
A lot of people have dismissed the Wii price point announcement, saying that console price isn't important when you consider all the games that people purchase in the long run.
This ignores the purchasing patterns that people have. Even if the overall price (with games) of the Wii was *more* expensive then the competition, the lower initial console price would still cause purchases in their favor.
This happens for the same reason that people buy things on credit cards and then pay them off over time. If people don't need to pay for something immediately, then they don't think about it.
Furthermore, there's the issue of Christmas, birthdays etc for children. A lot of parents raising children are on a pretty tight budget, and you can be sure they will balk at a console that costs 50 to 100 dollars more than the competition, let alone a console like the PS3 that's going to cost as much as 3 times the competition. Christmas is going to be huge for nintendo at their price point.
I remember begging my parents for an original NES then on christmas opening up a game that consisted of a video cassette of a race, and a little toy car that attached to the front of the tv and moved horizontally from a little electric motor.
Right now, a lot of parents are in those shoes. It may be true that the economy overall has picked up, but wages definitely have *not* and the wall mart shoppers of america are in even worse straights then they generally are.
Most people in the tech sector are pretty well off, and even if they aren't tend to be hard core gamers and see their game expense as a non negotiable expenditure in their budget. In the past game companies pandered to them exclusively because they were willing to burn a lot of money, and not a lot of people outside that group played video games at all. What they need to realize is that increasingly they are not the only gamers in the market. Nintendo has picked up on this, and effectively has been making their prices cheaper and cheaper over the years by keeping them the same and let inflation make that same price less. Sony and microsoft on the other hand seem to be competing entirely for early adopters with cash to burn, which is a lucrative but small demographic.
Nintendo probably has one of the best business models in the entire electronics industry. They make money on the box. They make money on the first-party games. They make a little less money on all the other games. They make money on the IP surrounding the games, to the extent that just *one* of their franchises has a worldwide value approaching that of a small country. With the advent of downloadable games on the Wii (whhhhhhhhhhhhhhy), they'll even make money on the retail/distribution of games (no more paying BestBuy/WalMart/Yamada Denki a 60% cut).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Mom has a budget for Christmas. $200 fits into that budget nicely -- split the gift among two kids, buy them a game, tell them to share, give them hugs and then watch them run off to the TV. $600 doesn't fit within that budget -- it causes mom to seize up and say "Why is this so expensive? Nintendos are always $200. What is this, a computer?"
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
He didn't say "Look passed console prices." He says "check our PAST console prices" Suggesting it's going to be a comparable baseline.
The N64 and the cube were not "years old tech" at launch, they were fairly powerful and new systems that actually had equal or better graphics than their competitors (albeit with worse storage). The Wii is their first underpowered, years-old-tech system (actually recently redesigned, just very budget). Unless you mean the handhelds, which are low tech but even they have some impressive minaturisation going on.
Now when people ask Satoru Iwata the same question, he says, "Oh, it'll be cheap." (Note: Affordable is marketese for cheap.)
I'm just hoping that Iwata-san is as truthful here as Kutaragi-san. If so, Merry Christmas....
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I'm thinking that the console itself will be $199.99. No problem there, it's cheap hardware and consistent with Nintendo's previous price points. The games, I expect will vary from $19.99 for your average puzzle/sports game to $49.99 for something like Red Steel. I don't expect them to shoot up to $59.99 like PS3 or 360 due to Nintendo's stance on bringing in new gamers. They aren't targeting the hardcore gamer like PS3 or 360. The real kicker will be buying extra controllers/accessories. I'm thinking that the controllers themself have to be at least $50 a pop. There is so much tech shoved into those, I can't imagine they would go for anything less.
My custom-made bumper sticker, which I've not yet had the gumption to stick on the actual car, reads "Try driving like a decent person. Maybe you'll become one." I'm actually afraid to apply the thing; it seems like it might draw some sort of road rage attack.
There's some balancing point between faked respect -- insincerity -- and the sort of "disrespectful" tone we're talking about in the MS and Sony comments. I think we all know which side of that balance U.S. drivers fall on. Think "Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on the rival truck make's logo" decals. Nice.
(I was going to say Iwata was quintessentially Japanese in these comments, but then Sony is one of the counterexamples.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I priced out all the systems from NES to Wii, Master System to Dreamcast, PSX to PS3, and Xbox to Xbox 360, including inflation and release dates in another slashdot post.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
It won't be $25 at a yard sale yet either.
Sure it will.
In 2012 or so.
Also by then, a non-HD television to plug it in to will be free. People will beg you to take it, so they can avoid the disposal fee.
So realistically, buying one now with the intention of selling it in six years only costs you $225. Plus, it will enable you to get somebody to take your old TV set when the time comes. That's gotta easily be worth $26 or so.
There you go. $199 price-point reached. ^_^
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
At 50 games for a console, all apparently paid for at full price (which you see fond of), you have an insane amount of disposable income, and money doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, 20 games remains a respectable personal library. Many people will pay less than full price, buying some used, getting some as gifts, getting some from friends who are tired of the game. Those 20 games will be spread out over 2 or so years, so a game purchased 2 years after the purchase of the console is effectively much cheaper because that $50 was sitting in a bank account earning a few percent interest instead of having been spent on a more expensive system. Finally, you're assuming that most Wii games are going to run $50. Given Nintendo's goals (to make the Wii mass-market in far beyond any other game console ever), this seem unlikely.
Ultimately, Sony is asking for $500 right now. (Well, when it ships) For many people this means saving up to purchase a PS3 ($500 for the low end) and a single game ($50). For that same amount of saving, someone can purchase a Wii (Let's use the pessimistic $250 estimate), a second controller so they can play with a friend (say $50), and five games (using your pessimistic $50 estimate = $250). They can swap games for controllers, so if they'd rather be able to support a four player game immediately, that still leaves them with two games. Or, if saving up $550 in a single shot is a bit much, they can buy the console and a single game ($300), then purchase more games as they save enough to purchase them.
Putting it in other terms, with the money a college student saves buying a Wii instead of a PS3 he can buy a pretty good 27" SDTV to play it on. Assuming he already has a television, he can buy a $40 DVD player and assuming he pays the ridiculous $40 per disc, 5 movies to watch on it. Or even more realistically, he can have himself 50 pints of beer at the local overpriced college bar.
Price matters. To claim that it doesn't means you're lucky enough to have no real money concerns, or you've been drinking Sony's kool-aid.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Forget "inflation". If you really want to compare values, line up the cost of the consoles against the cost of computing hardware.
I used the Mac, because it's conventient to look up past prices on "lowendmac.com", admitedly, Apple pricing has historically been downright goofy compared to commodity PC's, but this is just let's check it out.
In 1985, when the NES was released for $200, the Macintosh 512K (no hard drive) came out for $3,300.
In 1990, when the $200 SNES arrived, the Mac IIfx was introduced at $9,900.
Today, the Wii is expected to be released for $250 (maybe $200), and you can buy a new Mac mini for $600.
There was a time when console gaming was THE gaming solution for those who could not afford to just buy a game computer.
These days, if you want to sell a console, you need some other hook besides price to set it apart. Sony and Microsoft are betting on selling you an uber-fast PC dressed like a console and taking a loss on each unit. Nintendo is hoping their "sideways TV remote" controller will dazzle people.
I'm going to reserve judgement until all three consoles are actually out (and a few more games have appeared for each), but so far it's looking like a very easy generatin of consoles to skip, especially when there's an interesting and exciting hand-held game market to eat my available entertainment dollars.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Apple pricing has historically been downright goofy compared to commodity PC's, but this is just let's check it out.
Gyah. Preview, preview, preview.
That was supposed to read:
Apple pricing has historically been downright goofy compared to commodity PC's, but this is just meant to be a quick-and-dirty snapshot of a couple eras... let's check it out.
Why, oh why, does the slashcode still not allow edits, after all these years!?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
not in the long run, anyway. In the current gen, new ps2 game gamecube games are priced about the same, but the shear number of ps2 games means there are more cheap used games to by, more $20 dollar games, and a better selection (quantity, not quality).
Right now if I go on ebay, chances are good I can find a ps2 game I'd like to play for under $10. Heck, chances are I can find 20 such games. I know, I've been sniping cheap ps2 games off ebay for between $4 and $10 bucks, building a collection of 40+ games for under $400 plus the cost of the console. Try doing that for the N64 much less the GC. There's just too few A-list or even B-list titles for current gen Nintendo consoles. It drives up demand and prices. Yeah, I can get Madden 20xx on the cheap, but if you want a Metroid game or Super Mario 64 be prepared to shell out $15 to $25 bucks most of the time. Meanwhile I've got Ratchet and Clank, NFS Underground, Wild Arms 3, Rygar, Maximo, Soul Calibre 2, Virtua Fighter 4 Evo, etc etc all for $5 bucks or less.
Yeah, I know, current gen doesn't mean next gen. But it comes down to securing lots and lots of publishers, and so far the Big N's been a bit harsh to it's third party devs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In the uk at least...
... but I could have hardly ran Dark age of Camelot on it never mind anything else !
... but like the sheeple in the UK that cant afford to live a healthy life but can seem to buy a £80 designer 'brand' top... it wouldn't surprise me if many families in the uk went without food just so their kid could buy into the next Sony generation.
An EXCELLENT PC that would last a few years before going out of date in 1995 was £1800-2000
Even then I could have picked up a £500 4Mb ram DX2 66... but I could have hardly ran magic carpet on it never mind anything else !
An EXCELLENT PC that would last a few years before going out of date in 2005 was £1800-2000
Even then I could have picked up a £500 celeron
I built a £600 computer for a friend 2 years ago using the best available components at the time for the price point (sadly including an integrated motherboard...) Will he be running vista anytime soon? I doubt it (scratching basic requirements) (his wife btw demanded windows at the time)
So yes... you can buy an apple mini for $600 and if you go the official upgrade path with apple in the uk a reasonable mini will cost you more like £999 and will still be dead in the water in less than 2 years !
The only thing that has really changed is media... You can run reasonable quality digital audio and video on an entry level Pc unlike 10 years ago but when HDTV/HDMI comes into play the majority of those PC's will also be dead in the water...
I guess you could also say the same for business workstations and office needs... but I'm thinking if Microsoft get their way you'll need a £1,000+ computer to run the next office at the same functionality as your £600 3 year old computer runs office 2000 today. At least however, unlike 1995, I can have a substantial spreadsheet open and not have the computer creaking and shaking like its something out of the dark ages... that is of course, unless I was running it in DOS... and things were still fast and furious then.
The point of the argument I'm trying to make here is that YES you can now buy a computer for $600 that does the majority of home tasks you need for today. The computer will run a good percentage of games available within the last 6 months and before at medium level graphics but it wont do you any good in the near future... its a consumable, an appliance if you will.
In the above respect your mac mini is very much a 'console' in itself, and just like the PS2 or xBox will be downgraded to the 'standalone dvd player' variety within a number of years... For what the mini does I think its great, but to suggest its competitive to the PS3, 360 or even possibly the Wii I think is pushing it a little. Admittedly I can add more memory to a mac mini... but the graphics card is a great letdown for any serious gamer.
I dont think things have changed that much apart from to suggest the signal to noise ratio has significantly increased since the price of a bog standard PC has came down in general. But that could be considered elitist, and I realise there are many exceptions... but I think I preferred the internet way back when the majority of usage was academic -- at least I didn't have to put up with leet speak and all the other crap that I believe has increased (porn excluded) due to the commoditization of computers.
Disclaimer:
just to note I think that
A) Sony has over priced its product here and expects everyone to pay the brand (being a Nintendo fanboy I hope people dont *coff*)
B) I realise my examples above were very PC based but nothing was meant as a dig to apple as a company or their products. I have a highly modified Apple cube that I use as a webserver/fileshare/torrents etc that I absolutely adore and will continue to tinker with. I feel that like the Mini, the cube was ahead of its time and the amount of engineering involved is amazing... but then I do have a 256mb 5600 gfx card in the cube.
C: After previewing, my pound (£) sign apparently doesn't work googlebar spellcheck bug?... (still shows fine in edit mode).... please excuse the screwed symbols
You know you can plug it into an HDTV, right? Kind of like you can plug an ordinary DVD player into an HDTV, or a Gamecube or PS2, or a Betamax machine.
You know you can plug it into an HDTV, right?
I can also spread peanut butter on a Kobe steak, but that seems kind of wasteful when I'll get the same peanut butter taste spreading it on Wonder Bread.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I included inflation adjustments in my other post to illustrate that the PS3's price point was a heavier load on consumers' wallets than any past system (though the Sega Saturn got close). I also had a conclusion: a cheap system with an early release stands far stronger than more expensive systems released later on ... being the last one out of the gates and releasing at the highest initial price doesn't bode well for the PS3, especially since Nintendo will be sharing their release window. Another note I made was that Sega made it big by releasing the Genesis long before the SNES, and Sony did the same with the PSX. ... Microsoft's Xbox stands tall with a year's lead over the PS3 and Wii.
Inflation adjustments give us an estimate of what those systems cost in terms of modern cash equivilance. It weights the upward trend of console costs with the downward trend of the value of American cash. I did not use inflation as the comparative rate, only a bias to compare console prices overall.
Console gaming is still the definitive low-budget gaming solution. A computer that can play games has always required far more money than the standard desktop computer: Ask any gamer about the Mac Mini and you'll find it can't do much; slow drives, horrible graphics, average processor, not upgrade-friendly, and you'll need a new mouse at least. On top of that, Macs don't run most games; you'll need Windows.Most video game consumers are NOT technical in terms of computing; they want something affordable and specialized to the purpose of playing games. Take a look at the success of iPods, for example. Simple and specialized. I do not think that comparing the relative cost of computers to consoles is a good measure; video game consoles are always on a strict budget, and they'll cram in as much technology (be it GPU power or clever interfaces) as possible within that budget.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.