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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.
Same with Apple and iPhone apps. You pay $100 and off you go.
Plus $600 for Xcode if you don't already have an Intel Mac, but your point is still valid.
But Nintendo...$2000 for the SDK? Ick.
That's peanuts compared to the cost of doing an internship in another state and then leasing an office. Nintendo requires developers to have a dedicated office and experience in the mainstream video game industry.
Actually to get the last great push for sales... enable the DVD drive to play movies!!!
That would presumably cost more to build. There is a DVD-Video player for the jailbroken Wii, but it makes the drive wear out faster.
And upgrade the flash player!
Nintendo upgraded Internet Channel to Flash 9 a few weeks ago. See Slashdot coverage.
In the wii, downloadable upgrade must be done in the game itself since there is no operating system running when the game run. marcan explains that very well in http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/
I read just yesterday that the rumor is the Wii's replacement will bring it up to par with the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
That must have been fanboys that still have some hope left that Nintendo actually still cares about gaming. I for one have given up that hope long ago and the last tiny bit that might have been left was smashed a few days ago when I downloaded the horoscope channel. The company that once up on a time gave us Mario, Zelda, Metroid and all the other stuff just isn't there anymore and has been replaced by some trendy lifestyle product producer or whatever you want to call what they are now.
No, he's completely serious. Nintendo sells their hardware for a profit, always have and always will. When you bought your GC for $100 that was late in the console's life and it cost less than $100 to make. When the GC was launched at $200, it cost less than $200 to make. All they do is games -- they can't afford to subsidize their gaming business with money from other sectors like Sony and MS.
In fact, it's only recently that selling hardware at a loss became popular. For most of its life, the PS2 was sold at a profit. Xbox was the exception last time, as Sony/Big N hilariously revealed.
Of course Nintendo also likes game royalties, and thus charges what the market will bear for games. But no, selling hardware at a loss and making it up with games isn't their business model. Profiting off of hardware, then profiting off of games is their business model.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'd say that compulsive use of 3D in what's really platformer games is the greatest weakness in current game consoles.
Shadow Complex, recently released on Xbox Live Arcade, demonstrates this. The gameplay is 2D but the graphics are 3D. It's basically Super Metroid set in the West Coast mountains in the near future. The developers were open about the blatant copying, there's even a developer's statement in one of the menus that says they wanted to make a new Metroidvania game. The game is superb, and would have played just fine with 2-D graphics as well.
Someone please mod this down- it is definitely untrue. While the GameCube version was released after the Wii version, Twilight Princess was developed as an end-of-cycle GameCube game, and was ported to the Wii to give it a another "Flagship Title."