Slashdot Mirror
Wii Gets Price Cut To $199
After watching Microsoft and Sony drop the prices on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, Nintendo has decided to jump in with a price cut as well. Starting September 27th, the Wii will cost $199 in North America, a $50 drop from the previous price. Japan will be getting a slightly smaller price cut, but Europe seems to be left out of this change. Nintendo is hoping this reduction and the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Wii Fit Plus in the coming months will boost slipping sales rates.
but it's hard to argue that Nintendo doesn't care about gaming - everything about the Wii is targetted towards gaming.
What? A control system that flat out fails for most games, hardware that would have been top of the line 10 years ago, online gaming that pretty much doesn't exist, ... nothing on the Wii say "gaming" to me. The only good game the system has are games that either where originally Gamecube games or could have functioned on the Gamecube just fine (Mario, Zelda, SmashBros, ...). Nintendos focus these days lies elsewhere.
I wouldn't mind a crazy useless horoscope channel if there would be lots of gaming stuff around on the Wii, but there simply isn't. The games suck, they don't have proper online gaming, they don't have demos, they don't even have a usable channel to watch game trailers and their virtual console doesn't exactly impress either, but hey they have a balance board and soon a pulse meter and all that other stuff that has hardly anything to do with gaming.
The Wii is all kinds of things, but nothing close to a decent gaming console.
Microsoft had to invested 1 billion dollar for the red-ring warranty expansion, divide that by the estimated cost of a repair and you get the number of failed boxes, divide that by boxes in total and you get the failure rate. So:
$1.000.000.000 / $150 = 6.666.666
6.666.666 / 30.000.000 = 22%
So its at the very minimum a 22% failure. Things to take into account however: A repair might cost Microsoft quite a bit less then the $150 they charge you for out of warranty repairs (especially considering a new Xbox360 cost $199 on Amazon) and newer boxes fail less then older boxes. So the failure rate for old boxes is likely to be much higher then 22%, while the failure rate for newer boxes might be lower.
bla bla I'm the center of the universe, my taste is what is true in gaming, I know all my wrong Nintendo clichés by heart, bla bla
The Wii games library is not any more a weakness than the PS2 library was, as the PS2 library was also terrible.
Trying to make a point with nonsense like saying that Smash Brothers isn't a Wii game won't work (except perhaps on Slashdot where most of people were ridiculing the Wii name when it was announced), and saying there's no Zelda for Wii is stupid too.
Mario Kart has become a decent party game. It's incredible how the Wii destroyed the brain of its haters this gen.
The same poster that suddenly put Mario Kart in the party game genre (which is nonsense) is saying the Wii has no racing game.
It's called Mario Kart and sold more than most games out there in a very little time : the game is 1,5 years old and is going on selling 18 millions units if not more. But it's only a decent party games to some people. Knowing that, you know the opinion of such people can't be reliable or representative of anything but a niche of elitists or people with an agenda.
People like that don't know anything either, they say the Wii has no racers (and yet they cited Mario Kart) or decent RPG (and yet there are several like Fire Emblem, Tales of, ...).
There's a huge credibility problem, accentuated by citing top ranking games on Gamespot (for the Wii I suppose), and saying half of them we were tired playing 10 years ago. So Gamespot is not reliable to rate games, so why cite Gamespot?
It's funny that it goes on with fitness games. I don't know EA Active, but saying Wii Fit is fucking terrible is nonsense, and I'm confident it is a very good game, with 15+ millions people at least agreeing with me.