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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.
Yeah. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but XNA and XBLA were fantastic ideas that have led to some great games. Same with Apple and iPhone apps. You pay $100 and off you go. But Nintendo...$2000 for the SDK? Ick.
This has always been Nintendo's biggest weakness. While their in-house development is good, they have an abysmal track record when it comes to third-party support. With the reinvention of the one-man "indie" developer this problem is exacerbated.
You give your own criticism to your own comment.
When it was *released* it was out of date. And it's still the best-selling games console. So what makes you think that the graphics/performance have any effect on *sales* at all? Did you ever seriously believe that game console wars have *ever* been solved by technical prowess and not by games, marketing, gameplay, etc.? At best you could claim that you prefer games with style/content but the sales figures speak for themselves about how bothered the general populous is about the "out-of-date"-ness that the Wii was released with... None.
It's been a wonderful product because it proves the point that I've always maintained - games don't even *need* graphics at all to be great games. It's always been true, but people lost track of that during the last few generations of console wars.
Eh... while the Atari, PS2, and Wii examples are accurate, I don't think the NES/SNES/PSX examples are correct.
NES and SMS were very very close in capability. The SMS might have been superior in some nitpicky sense, but if you play games on both systems it isn't apparent that SMS outpaces NES. I'll give you credit that NES won despite not having any obvious technical superiority (since it didn't.)
At SNES vs Genesis: Genesis was noticably inferior. Genesis was NOT 32 bit capable, as it used a 68000 on a 16 bit bus. Its cpu was measurably faster, however its graphics and sound hardware were noticeably behind SNES. If you play SNES and then play Genesis, especially games that were on both systems, the SNES version nearly always had better graphics and sound. Due to the censorship issue, I wouldn't compare Mortal Kombat 1 on Genesis to SNES, but if you go to MK2, the SNES version is a lot closer to the arcade version than the Genesis version was. Having a slightly faster processor doesn't outweigh the greatly superior dedicated sound and graphics chips of the SNES. Genesis can only put 64 colors on screen out of a palette of 4096... SNES can put 256 colors on screen out of a palette of 32768. Not to mention FM synthesis in the Genesis vs 8 channel PCM mixing in SNES.
As far as Playstation vs N64... the Playstation won because its storage system was technically superior to N64. Game developers didn't want to be limited to expensive ROM, so developers switched in droves to PSX. The 3d rendering capabilities of N64 were limited by the small amount of data each game could hold, not to mention a tiny texture cache that limited the detail in games. Granted, the main CPU in N64 was superior to the main CPU in PSX, but this isn't the only "technical" detail of the system. Playstation won due to technical superiority: In 1996, CDs were technically superior to rom cartridges.