No Price-Cuts for Nintendo Wii This Holiday Season – Company

[zippyjuan]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multime...011211544.html
Unlike Sony, they have little reason to cut their prices.

No Price-Cuts for Nintendo Wii This Holiday Season – Company.
Nintendo Wii Will Continue to Sell for $249

Category: Multimedia

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/11/2007 | 09:16 PM ]


Nintendo Wii game console will retain its $249 price-tag for foreseeable future in the
U.S. due to the fact that Nintendo has no problems with demand towards its latest game console, a company exec said on Thursday. In fact, there was hardly any need for the firm to cut the price not only because the demand outstrips supplies, but also because Nintendo earns money on Wii hardware, an unusual situation in the game console space.

“We’ll stay at $249 for the foreseeable future. We are still selling everything we can make,” George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing at Nintendo America, told Reuters news-agency in an interview.

Nintendo Wii has been selling in over 400 thousand quantities monthly in the U.S. in the past few months, according to figures from NPD group. Usually the demand towards game console skyrockets in November, December and January, hence, the main task for Nintendo is rather to secure more console hardware to keep up with demand than to cut the price to stimulate the demand. Even though the company promised to deliver as many consoles as possible, it warned that not everyone will be able to obtain Wii.

Nintendo Wii, the most successful new-generation game console, features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.

Nintendo set the recommended retail price of ¥25 000 (about $204) in Japan, $249 in the U.S. and €249 ($342) in Europe.

[bachviet]

Why cut price on a system that is sold out almost everything it is available at retail stores?

[VTGreg]

Why cut price on a system that is sold out almost everything it is available at retail stores?

Seriously, this isn't even news. The only news would be if they did cut the prices as that would be an incredibly stupid idea.

It will be very interesting to see if PS3 can gain any traction this holiday season with the recent hardware and price changes.

[Cubsfan]

Seriously, this isn't even news. The only news would be if they did cut the prices as that would be an incredibly stupid idea.

It will be very interesting to see if PS3 can gain any traction this holiday season with the recent hardware and price changes.

That will be interesting. However, I'm pretty much on the edge of finally buying a 360. The new processors, the price drop, and the bundled games are all big selling point. But, in the end, there's simply way more games I want to play on the 360 than PS3.

[Chgoman]

I picked up a Wii yesterday. The guy at the store said they haven't gotten any for a while as Nintendo was holding shipments while they refitted the boxes with a rubber sleeve for the controller which now comes with the system. He said they got a big shipment now that they are done and the next one should be big also. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone was looking, it seems like a good time.