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.'"

Comments

200 bucks it is then...

[gEvil (beta)]

You may want to check our past records of price points when launching past hardware.

Okay. 200 bucks it is then. I'm in.

Ok so basically

[masklinn]

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.

Re:Ok so basically

[Guppy06]

"Oh, and I'd be much more interrested by the potential price point of the games,"

$50, same as now.

The excuse for $60 games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is the higher resolution they display at. Since the Wii "only" does 480p, like the GameCube and the Xbox, the prices will be the same.

Re:Ok so basically

[grammar fascist]

For a company that's over a hundred years old, they certainly have an interesting take on inflation...

I'd say they have an absolutely correct take on commoditization.

Nintendo Pricing

[Chrismith]

"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."

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.

Two hundred fifty bucks!

[LoRdTAW]

$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.

Just wow

[Anonymous Coward]

BIZ: Speaking of Sony, I wanted to know what your reaction was to their media briefing, especially their expensive price and the fact that they now announced motion sensing for the PS3 controller.

SI: As for the latter part of the question, actually we were anticipating that Sony would make that kind of announcement, so I had to make a kind of wry smile at the time. Having said that, however, putting the motion sensing technology into the classic [PS3] controller, which is going to be held with two hands, is pretty much different from the motion sensor being incorporated into the Wii remote or the combination of the Wii remote and the nunchuk controller... There's a huge gap between the two, I can tell you, with that whole experience, so I really don't think that the inclusion of motion sensing into Sony's classic type of controller can affect in one way or the other the advantage that we have with the Wii controller.

As for the comment on the price point that Sony announced, the only thing that I may be able to tell is that probably there's a huge gap between how the platform supplier wants to price it and how the customers want the supplier to price it. And other than that it's very hard for me to comment on that as the corporate president running a rival corporation. I think the ultimate decision has to be made by the actual customer and as one of the potential customers of PS3, of course I think it's going to be kind of a [tough] price point for anybody to purchase; that sentiment has been shared by a number of people working in this industry that I've been able to talk to so far.

After these weeks of Sony trashing on Nintendo in their press conference, and Microsoft trashing on Sony every time they opened their mouth after their press conference, and Sony trashing Microsoft right back, the amount of tact Mr. Iwata is showing here is rather shocking.

Re:price doesn't matter... much

[MeanderingMind]

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.

very important in economic times like these

[sentientbrendan]

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 != a commodity product, just built of em

[patio11]

The funny thing is, Nintendos *aren't* commoditized. They've got one monopoly supplier which makes a 20% profit margin per unit, which is unheard of in commodity electronics (stereos, hard drives, MP3 players whose names don't rhyme with tripod, etc). The real commodity is the years-old tech they stuff into every box, which keeps their costs down and lets them continue spinning straw into gold by taking the comparitively low-power, low-cost chips and letting them play *insert Nintendo franchise here*. Meanwhile, the other console manufacturers are beating themselves silly trying to cram bleeding edge stuff into their boxes and paying through the nose, then trying to make up the per-unit loss on volume (ok, to be less snide, on per-game licensing fees).

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).