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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.'"
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
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.
I would say that if you buy 20 games at $50 each, you're insane. I have around 20 PS2 games, and about 6 of those were bought for $50. The rest were either used or on sale. I think it's accurate to say that most gamers fall more in line with my buying pattern. Perhaps you should re-do your math to reflect those of us who are sane.
I'm not really following your price comparisons. Advance Wars DS does not cost the same as Oblivion, it's almost half the price, $35 vs $60.
Your point about downloadable game I agree with though, they better be cheap, especially if they are straight ports.
Finally, I'm getting sick of the argument that X costs more than Y because "X has better hardware/more features". I don't care one bit what it costs to make something, if the feature does not have value to me, I don't want to pay for it. That is something Sony does not understand. I won't be buying a PS3 because it has Blu-Ray, I will buy it IF there are games I want to play. The fact it has Blu-Ray holds no value for me.
Just a few points.
1) There's a difference between a wide selection and a wide variety. I may have 200 different kinds of peanut butter I can buy at the grocery store, but they're still all peanut butter. I'm not saying the PS3 won't have a large selection, or variety, I'm just saying we don't know if it will.
2) You make a great point about how over the life of a console, the actual cost of the console itself pales in comparison to the additive cost of the games (if you buy a great many). Here's the thing, we know for a fact that games for the PS3 and Xbox 360 will cost $60 new. The price for Wii games will be lower, though I'm not overly optimistic and personally only see them staying at $50 (although some would say they'll be priced similarly to DS games around $35). Over the course of 20-50 purchases that price difference adds up. With my estimation, that's $200-$500 more you'd pay for an equivalent number of PS3 or Xbox 360 games than for a Wii. If we go for the optimistic view, the figure changes to $500-$1250 more. The benefit Nintendo offers isn't just a cheaper console, but cheaper games too.
3) Most people don't have $500-$600 just sitting around. Regardless of the relative unimportance of the console's cost in the long run, it's not easy to spend half a grand. Your everyday Joe, even college students, can compulsively pay $50-$60 for a game. They can even compulsively buy $200 consoles. However, as a price gets higher the "ease" with which one can just go ahead and buy something decreases drastically. $300 gives some pause, $400 requires some careful thought, but $500 and $600 are extremely difficult to say, "Oh what the heck, I'll buy it!" to.
That's not to say there are people whose compulsivity knows no bounds. Those people exist. I'm also not implying that the only way consoles are bought are through compulsion, that's certainly not true. $500 or $600 will cause people to stop and think before buying when they might not have otherwise. They may well decide to buy anyway, with logic very much like yours, but they may well look at the other options and decide they like them better.
Console price may not be the "driving" factor, but it is a major one.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
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.