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Evidence for Console Price Cuts
Next Generation offers up an exhaustive analysis of previous console generation price cuts, and concludes that we are definitely due for some cheaper next-gen action sometime in the near future. The piece includes charts of lowering system prices, as well as a breakdown of how many consoles sold at various price tiers. "Certainly we can use history as a guide, but there are limits to its use for prognostication. The price drops this generation may happen in ways entirely different from what has been suggested above. Maybe the $300 console this generation will be what the $200 console was last generation. Maybe Microsoft will forge ahead with its current price structure until after Halo 3 has come and gone. Maybe Sony will bless the PlayStation 3 with a 33% price drop sometime this year. And maybe Nintendo will give the Wii a small price drop by removing Wii Sports from the package. Those could happen, but don't bet on it."
Only the PS3 feels overpriced to me. The 400 dollar price point of a 360 premium or 250 for the Wii seem very reasonable and fair to me...I had no buyers remorse spending that much on either system.
I simply cannot justify, however, spending 600 on a PS3. I don't care if it is a Blu-Ray player, I still cannot justify it.
If the PS3 were 400, I would likely buy one. If there were more than two games I was highly anticipating (God of War 3 and Lair) I would be willing to pay 450.
But 600? No fucking way.
Living With a Nerd
They're going through historic trends, and guessing what the current outcome is going to be. That is NOT evidence - that is conjecture.
Ryan Fenton
If Moore's Law applies to consoles they should halve in price every 2 years.
If you look at their price cut per month scale it seems to fit pretty neatly in there with a 50% price cut at the 24 month mark. However there it stabilities, I suppose there are minimum costs involved with logistics and whatnot that prevent further price drops.
Doesn't this happen with every console?
Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Sometime in the near future something is going to happen. It could be good for you. But don't bet on it.
Considering one of the main "pick up and play" games for the Wii is Wii Sports itself, I see it as highly unlikely that they'll de-bundle that anytime soon. Eventually it'll happen, but not soon IMO.
What's the news here? It's not saying that there is any indication that there will be any price cuts other than, "there was price cuts with the last generation, so there will be with this one". Personally, I think the PS3 has the most to lose. It's not selling well, and it's already being sold less than cost, so I don't think a price cut would Sony that much. However, if the XBox 360 and the Wii take a price cut, then the PS3 will be left as the really expensive one that nobody wants to buy.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Of course we will see price cuts, everyone but Nintendo are in urgent need of a larger sales base because the Wii is raping them six ways from Sunday. These predictions are ridiclous and on a long enough time line cannot fail to be correct.
Why was an article even wrote and why is it on Slashdot?
I like muppets.
This is ridiculous.
Maybe something will happen. Maybe it won't. I can make random conjectures too.
Best Windows Freeware
You mean to tell me that eventually expensive new things cost less as they get older? Shocking! Seriously this is the most obvious piece of "news" ever. The fact that it's so vague makes it even more funny.
There isn't a good reason for Nintendo to drop Wii Sports from the North American Wii package. Wii Sports is a great hook for selling the system.
At this point, the cost of removing Wii Sports would probably only save a a few dollars or so at most (Disc pressing, manual, and packing). Cutting the system price by $50 wouldn't require pulling Wii Sports to make it feasible. I suppose you could argue that Nintendo could make part of that $50 back by selling Wii Sports as a stand alone game. However, Nintendo would then risk not having a great ratio to new Wii sales and losing the part of the Wii system that makes the whole bundle so easy to pickup with family and friends who have never touched a game system.
Simply put, cutting Wii Sports does not fit with the "Blue Ocean" strategy.
I simply cannot justify, however, spending 600 on a PS3. I don't care if it is a Blu-Ray player, I still cannot justify it.
The valid point of view contrary to this is that if you have an HD setup, and are therefore probably considering getting some kind of next-gen player at some point, then the PS3 which is affordable as next-gen players go and is a game console actually looks like a decent deal. This is the standard argument against the PS3 being overpriced (the "you get a lot for the money" argument), and it is a valid viewpoint if it applies to you, but it misses the bigger point:
Basically nobody who is balking at the price of the PS3 gives a shit about the "you get a lot for the money" argument. If you have enough to blow on an HD home theatre then you can easily afford the PS3 and sure maybe it's a good deal. "Good deal" and "affordable" aren't the same, and the fact is the PS3 is not affordable to many people. Just like a 70ft yacht for $100k might be a great deal, you will still find sales of such a yacht limited to the wealthy. Duh. So why people think "you get a free bluray player!" will make people leary of spending $600 on an entertainment device more likely to buy a PS3, I don't know.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why should Nintendo drop Wii Sports from the package? It's the biggest, best piece of advertisement they have. It's Wii Tennis, or Wii Bowling, that sells grandmothers and fathers on buying their own Wii after having played a round or two at their kids place.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Why would they de-bundle a piece of software that costs them nothing to re-produce (bundle) in the first place? Customers are eating it up at the current price point as is.
If the PS3 dropped the integrated blueray player (so long as it isn't needed for the actual game discs), and dropped the price to be in line with the xbox 360, I would buy one in a heartbeat. If I want a game system, I'll buy a game system. If I want a Blue Ray player, I'll buy a Blue Ray player.
Seems like a case of 'feature creep' to me. At the VERY least they should offer a cheaper iteration of the console that doesn't include the player, that is accessible by your average gamer, which isn't necessarily rich.
So it's not impossible that they'd leave it out.
I'd welcome them at least offering the option of getting a slightly cheaper Wii with no Wii Sports, or even a slightly more expensive one with a different bundled game.
I'm interested in getting the system for Mario Galaxy and Monkey Ball. I'm not interested in Wii Sports.
While the Wii seems reasonable to most people who can afford to spend on a system, The major issue for the 360 or PS3 is that you have to spend more immediately on games to have any fun. The Wii leverages the variety of Wii sports so that people can be fascinated by the control system for a while before buying add-ons.
Instead of a price cut, perhaps MS will bundle the systems with more games and maybe a wireless controller or something. The Wii can just give away some free money to buy online games with. The PS3 needs to bundle their console with... a Wii
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Nintendo should probably de-bundle wii sports and instead sell the wii with mario party. I paid $40 for the most highly anticipated game since LoZ:TP at circuit city to learn that (after a near 3 month delay) the actual gameplay doesn't support 16:9 resolution, and that there are no sound/video options whatsoever. The cutscenes (if they so can be called) are in 16:9. basically, you're playing mario party 5 with a wii controller on your 50" panasonic plasma, and you've got 4 inch borders on each side of the screen. meanwhile, i could play Mario Party 5 on my wii and have full screen support, allbeit stretched, but fullscreen. now i get to wait til (at least) august for Metroid Prime 3. thank god i can play baten kaitos origins (which is fullscreened, btw) on my fancy new gamecube until then.
oh marmalade.
Ya know I'd be happy if i could find a Wii to buy at the current price.
I saw one at Wal-mart 2 months ago.. I haven't seen one since.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
that a PS3 price cut is coming. I just bought one :\
I cannot imagine Nintendo dropping the price on the Wii while supply / demand are so out of balance. If you're a manufacturer, and you can sell every single unit of a product you make, and you still have an order backlog, that's not a lot of motivation to drop price. On the other hand, if your product is sitting on the shelf and being outsold five to one by the competition in your home market *cough* Sony *cough*, you might consider dropping your price.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Is the shortage on Wiis over yet? (I finally got one of my own, so don't check it's availability anymore). There's no point in dropping the price on something that they can't keep on the shelves at the current price.
The Wii is sold out pretty much as soon as it enters stores. A price INCREASE might may sense, but a price decrease doesn't make sense until you start having demand problems. I don't think they'll increase the price due to public outrage, but the demand is there.
A price cut on the PS3 would bring an immediate price cut on the 360. Comparing a $500 PS3 to a $300 360, the $300 console is going to sell much better. Especially with a better game library right now. Sony should hope and pray that price cuts don't happen for any console until Sony has significantly reduced the manufacturing price.
Microsoft should have cut the price of the 360 in May. The Wii is very quickly gaining ground on the 360 and will catch up soon. The lead over the PS3 may disappear when Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid 4 come out. Microsoft should drop the 360 core (sell them with a hard drive for $249 until there are no more) and focus on a $299 360 premium. Anyone who wants to pay more can buy a $399 Elite. 360 sales are not very good and there is a lot of stock at stores. Pretty much everyone who wanted to buy one at $399 already has one.
Microsoft has non-traditional sources of income for the 360. Live brings in $50 a year per subscriber. Profit from Live is probably at least 30%. Microsoft makes a 30% profit from downloads. If someone is a Live subscriber and buys $50 worth of downloads a year (movies, television shows, Arcade, expansions, downloadable content), that would be $30 a year. Over 4 years, that's $120 profit. With publishers paying Microsoft $8 for every game sold, 20 games over 4 years adds up to $160. Both of those together would be about $280. If Microsoft's cost of manufacturing a 360 is about $300 http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20 061120132150.html/ (the article is dated November 20, 2006 and I'm assuming that it's lower now) and their cost of shipping, assembling and store profit is about $100, their total cost per console would be $400. Once the 65nm chips are out, it will only cut the cost further. You could make an argument for any price between $199 and $299. A $299 price would get them many more sales and would still be a profitable position in the long run. I don't think a price less than $299 is in the planning, but I think it could be justified.
If Microsoft wanted to screw over Sony, they would buy Rockstar and Square Enix. Buying Square Enix is probably the only way they could break into Japan. Make Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy exclusive to the 360. Release it for Windows Vista 6 months later. It would piss the Japanese off, but they would grit their teeth while buying a 360 to get some FF action. Losing Grand Theft Auto would kill the PS3 in North America and Europe, it would probably be enough to take it down worldwide. The Wii will continue to be profitable for Nintendo.
How can you talk about the PS3, 360, and Live in the same post and still say the 360 is much cheaper than the PS3? With Live you get to pay $50 a year over the life of the console for online match play, and you don't even get an HD-DVD player. The PS3 and 360 seem pretty evenly matched to me.
The Wii is busy actually expanding the game market into areas that wouldn't even consider a 360 or PS3 anyway, so it's hard to say what effect that is really having on sales (as in, would the PS3 or 360 really be selling much better if there were no Wii? I'm not sure that would be so).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First of all, have you considered that every game today is on a Blu-Ray disc, and without a Blu-Ray drive you'd have zero games to play? That doesn't seem very smart.
But to get back to the PS3 minus Blu-Ray - Sony is in this to win it all. Yes it has dampened PS3 sales, but only after a large surge of buying that has established the player in millions of homes. Is it winning against the 360? Not at all right now. But it may pick up a lot of steam later in the console cycle when the larger disc storage starts to show the difference.
But the PS3 has made the difference in the HD media war, where Blu-Ray is winning big time - sales at over two to one over HD-DVD since January, and with a growing lead. A victory there is huge, and sets of Sony for a lot of good things later on. They could not ignore a need to win there, nor could they ignore that with Microsoft's unwillingness to really back HD-DVD by including it in the console, Sony's doing so insured essentially an automatic victory of the format.
So short term losses for the gaming system for a much bigger win later on - in both gaming and media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Under Blue Ocean thinking, Nintendo is actually unlikely to cut the price of the Wii, especially as a response to a PS3 or 360 price cut. The "blue" is supposed to mean that they're in a non-competitive market.
Of course, such markets don't really exist, but the Wii IS differentiated. They walked the price cut path with the Gamecube, staying $50 - $100 cheaper than the PS2 and Xbox, and the market share slide that snowballed during the N64 days continued. Pricecuts don't always follow the Econ 101 S-D curves -- being the least expensive can make you seem the least worthy. "Cheap" is not a compliment, even when consumers are always asking for lower prices.
Whether you really believe the "blue" business or not, I think Nintendo believes it. The PS3 is going to drop first, and it's not even a lock that MS will respond, much less Nintendo. It's hard to imagine a $499 PS3 concerning anyone. MS ($100 less + Halo 3) and Nintendo (Let's play!) will just stay the course and see how the Christmas war goes with the big software releases.
Sometime in late Spring 2008, all 3 will pricedrop and MS will discontinue the Core. So if you wait until May 2008, you'll probably be able to choose from a $399 PS3, a $299 360 (Elite version), and a $199 Wii.
There's another scenario for the North American market in 2008. It's possible that Nintendo doesn't price drop. They may bundle Wii Health along with Wii Sports in the boxes. A disruptive "healthly lifestyle" non-game from the Big N may be humongous. Can you imagine that ad campaign targeted as casuals, including Moms with concerns about the dark side of gaming?
At this point, in Europe at least, all three are overpriced for what they offer. The only one that is debatable is the Wii - it seems to be selling just fine, even though it is definitely on the expensive side for what it offers. The other two are definitely overpriced; the PS3 obviously more so than the 360. Neither the PS3 nor the 360 are selling particularly well, either, which is most likely do to the high price of both.
(I do own a Wii and a PS3, by the way)
Even if 600 bucks is chump change, it's too much for the PS3 until some decent, exclusive games are available. I bought one purely because I love tech porn, and the PS3 is tech porn, but I can't see how anyone can justify buying a PS3 based on what it actually offers. Unless you really, really, really love Blu-Ray movies and Motorstorm.
People seem to buy it unbundled just fine.
It's not aimed at hardcore gamers. It's for casual gamers, and it's perfect for them. Easily worth 60 bucks - they probably get more playtime out of it than we get out of most hardcore games.
Nintendo makes a profit on every Wii that is sold, while the other 2 lose money. Nintendo could drop the price and just lose a little bit of cash and keep Wii Sports.
Maybe corrupt politicians will see the evil of their way, and have a change of heart ("How the Grinch Stole Christmas" style).
Maybe I'll win the million dollar jackpot... 5 times in a row.
There are a lot of things that are possible, but most of them just aren't probable.
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
Since you're comparing 'from launch', aren't you actually confirming that the PS3 is ON TRACK compared to similar 360 sales? (ergo, it's not losing 'cause people won't pay, it's losing 'cause it's the newer console)
Course, when you do like I did and toss the Wii in there for kicks, you notice it's climbing a lot faster than both.
I have both a Wii and a 360 and really dont understand why people are oblivious to the consoles being different enough to sell to two different markets. The Wii is doing great right now and will continue to do so, many people I know that have picked up a Wii would not have owned a console otherwise. My parents have a Wii and havent owned a game console since the Atari 2600 when I was a kid. One of the attorneys I work with gave them out as christmas presents. Its "the" hot gadget right now, the 360 could be $100 cheaper than the Wii and right now the Wii would outsell it for the novelty factor alone. The Wii is fun to play but is primarily a social gaming device. Hardcore gamers (the same ones who picked up the xbox and ps2 early in the last generation) are still going to be more attracted to the 360 and PS3. Currently the 360 is outselling its direct competition the PS3 so why bother with a price cut? Cutting the price now might bump sales a bit but really wont make a dent in Wii sales. The sales bump will come from those same xobx 360 and ps2 owners, the late adopters from last generation that tend to value a year or two of entertainment at about $100. They will buy it whenever the price reaches their breaking point whether thats now or next year so why rush it, cutting prices certainly wont increase profits since those that wait tend to also buy the budget titles as well.
I will be the first to admit that I would not have purchased Wii Sports had it not been included with the console. Ironically, that is the game played on my Wii 90% of the time I play with friends. If the price is dropped and Wii Sports is removed, the overall cost of the unit would rise as people would have to purchase that game separately.
...because i just paid full price for a PS3!
sigh. such is my luck.
Japan has no Wii Sports bundled with the console, precisely to keep the price point to 25,000 yen. The game is still extraordinarily popular (I think it had the highest attach rate for the console at launch, possibly exceeded by Zelda). You can see the terrible devastation this decision has caused their sales numbers. They only sell six consoles for every PS3 sold...
t endo-still-dominates-Japan/pg/49/aid/93613
Here is a random week in May.
* DS Lite - 160,009
* Wii - 55,725
* PSP - 33438
* PS2 - 11854
* PS3 - 8562
* X360 - 2369
* GBM - 403
* GBASP - 398
* DS - 303
http://ds.qj.net/Famitsu-weekly-console-sales-Nin
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Olevia 37 inch (good enough unless you have a fairly sizeable room) 720p for $700, used 1200 watt 7.1 surround from ebay $250. Thats 950 for an excellent tv and sound system and it's a hell of a lot better then the sd tube i used to have.
Plus i have a ten foot vga cable for it so i can make it a secondary demonstration monitor. The resolution/quality difference as long as you are within 6-7 feet is massive.
If you have $2000 dollars you can get an excellent DLP or a 47inch LCD. I don't see how this is not affordable for most american's.
Hmmm... Pie...
Sony doesn't have to cut the price of the PS3
Because--- THE PS2 is targeted at a price point and audience that is still outselling the xbox 360, ps3 and wii.
The xbox and gamecube are pretty much dead but the ps2 is going on strong. A price cut in the ps2 this xmas would have a lot of influence. If you are dirt poor and shop at walmart the ps2 is going to be a gemstone with its huge library and quality of games.
Sony doesn't have to count on the PS3 whoopin too much butt yet, but it will come.