This Week In The Business: ‘Nintendo Will Be Forced To Prematurely Lower The Wii U Price’

19 responses to “This Week In The Business: ‘Nintendo Will Be Forced To Prematurely Lower The Wii U Price’”

1. 

   chrobaciky

   January 20, 2013 at 1:25 pm

   Cool, $250 and I’m in….

   Reply
2. 

   moloko

   January 20, 2013 at 1:29 pm

   Nintendo will drop it 2 months before Xbox launch.

   Reply
3. 

   benj

   January 20, 2013 at 1:53 pm

   Every single week there’s something about Nintendo making games for other platforms! It’s not happening! You would have to be mentally retarded to keep believing that it might. As long as they still have a console, their games will not be on another platform.

   Why don’t MS and Sony ever get this treatment? Is it all just wishful thinking or has nobody bothered to look at Nintendo’s first party sales numbers? Because here’s a little fact, their games sell pretty damn well as they are.

   Reply
   1. 

      negativezero

      January 20, 2013 at 2:18 pm

      Probably the main difference is that games are only a small part of Microsoft and Sony’s businesses and they don’t develop many big games in-house. Nintendo is only in the games market and makes a ton of games themselves.

      Reply
   2. 

      weresmurf

      January 20, 2013 at 2:26 pm

      At one stage, people furiously believed Sega never would as well with Sonic. Maybe one day Nintendo will. Doesn’t matter how giant a company is, it eventually, eventually comes down. One day Nintendo will fall. On that day, they may indeed decide to go software oriented rather than hardware like Sega did. Personally, I don’t see that happening in that way but others do. It’s not outside the realms of possibility.

      Reply
      1. 

         benj

         January 20, 2013 at 2:40 pm

         I’m not saying it will never happen, it’s just not going to happen at least within the next couple of console generations. That’s why all this talk is useless. Nintendo are still relatively healthy right now.

         Reply
         1. 

            geometrics

            January 20, 2013 at 2:57 pm

            How is this conversation even happening, though? This is the company that sold, by a landslide, the most consoles this generation. Have I missed something? Why is this all anyone is discussing these days.

            Of the three consoles I own, Nintendo’s is the one I have the least investment in, but still, what are they doing so wrong that a few years of disappointing sales can undo an entire generation of massive success?

            Reply
            1. 

               benj

               January 20, 2013 at 3:10 pm

               People like to see once great companies turn into shells I guess. Business Analysts get off on this kind of stuff. It makes them look like they’re doing something.

               Every company goes through these kinds of lulls. Sony (both Playstation and the rest of the company) is in an even worse position at the moment. It doesn’t mean that either one of them are going to fold though. Their cash reserves are both strong enough to see them get through a softer sales period. As long as the sales are a bit lower though, people are going to be calling for the end of their consoles. Just because they can. And just because sites like Kotaku like to report it.

               Plus, as they say, never doubt Nintendo. They have an uncanny ability to completely turn everything around.

            2. 

               chrisco

               January 21, 2013 at 2:42 am

               selling consoles wont get you rich… its selling products for those consoles that make you rich… attachment rate of 1.5 games for every wii console is not good! hence why they had to roll into the next gen (for them that is) as opposed to the 8-9 xbox have.. a console has to keep its consumers interested so when the consumers realised the wii was fun for 5 minutes they left it there to collect dust. Nintendo got lucky in the fact that their product was a re-badged gamecube and could actually make money off their console sales alone but a consoles success is measured in ongoing sales of games which it hasn’t been doing for years now.

               I don’t think the wiiU is going sell that well at all. People will remember how the wii was awesome for a whole 5 minutes and won’t justify spending another $400 on something else to do the same. It’s gonna be a tough ride for Nintendo, I fear..

               They’ll join sega soon enough. sad, but true.

            3. 

               Cubits

               January 21, 2013 at 3:42 am

               Nintendo’s software sells a truckload! Both the handheld (a market they have had stitched up for the last forever) and console games they create sell well into the millions with great regularity. The fact that they don’t lose money on hardware (or much, and never for long), also means they aren’t hindered in that money printing.

               As long as the DS line dominates the handheld space, they could afford to blow a console. Not that i think that’s the case at all with the WiiU. We’ll see what happens when the competitors cards are revealed, but it’ll take more than the WiiU being beaten to take them out of the game.

      2. 

         dknight1000

         January 20, 2013 at 4:56 pm

         Sega still make Arcade Hardware, that being said if Nintendo did not have a console yes I could see them going software only instead of going belly up. But I honestly hope they can continue to make both Hardware and Software.

         And at the present point in time, anyone saying it’s in Nintendo’s best interest to sell on other platforms just isn’t thinking it through.

         Reply
         1. 

            weresmurf

            January 20, 2013 at 6:50 pm

            Indeed, its starting to look a bit wavy for Sony at the current time. PSVita is a complete, undeniable flop. PS3 is a hit no doubt but all other areas of the company have suffered incredibly. PS4 is going to be a major gamble too. It’s going to be interesting to see if this will be a succesful generation for Sony as well or not.

            Reply
            1. 

               dknight1000

               January 20, 2013 at 11:17 pm

               Honestly I feel it’s a bit early to call the Vita a flop, but they need to release some quality exclusive software and that’s Sony’s biggest problem they lack exclusives for the Vita. The upcoming Monster Hunter (a Capcom property that isn’t nessecaryily exclusive) and the new Pokemon game will move 3DS units and what does Sony have?

               Edit: I may say the Vita isn’t dead, but I admit it’s on Life Support.

               The other thing is Nintendo can win a fight with an underpowered machine, they’ve done it before (Gameboy vs Lynx and Game Gear) because they can put the must own games on their machines.

            2. 

               weresmurf

               January 21, 2013 at 1:38 am

               Nintendo are without a *doubt* the Kings of the handheld market. This is without question and there’s mountains of proof undeniable. The Wii was not a flop by any means sales wise, but however, when you look at what games are made by third party studios from say, midway through its lifespan to end, it’s not a great picture. I do hope the same pattern doesn’t befall the WiiU.

   3. 

      ruen

      January 20, 2013 at 4:48 pm

      I think the reasoning here is because both Sony and Microsoft to some certain extent do make games for other platforms. Sony has the PlayStation mobile suite which works for an array of both Sony and other branded Android smartphones, which in turn gives access to a handful of games from the PSone Library.

      Microsoft has Windows Phone 8, a phone OS running on multiple different smartphones by manufacturers such as HTC, Huawei, Nokia and Samsung. Windows Phone 8 has access to the Xbox Live infrastructure which could mean sometime down the track, if not already to some degree they could implement support to play some of the games available on Xbox (not physical boxed games, but some of the casual games available in their online store and such).

      In reality the only company that isn’t in some way testing the water with other platforms is Nintendo, that’s why people keep bringing it up every other week.

      Reply
4. 

   Franz

   January 20, 2013 at 2:53 pm

   Missing from the list: “If it can be remade in 2D, Zynga will rip it off.”

   Reply
   1. 

      hyperthx

      January 22, 2013 at 1:34 pm

      ‘2D’ is a stretch though – more like ‘coloured-tiles’

      Reply
5. 

   hyperthx

   January 22, 2013 at 1:17 pm

   Xbox360 was AU$649 here in Australia at launch…

   Reply
6. 

   hyperthx

   January 22, 2013 at 1:32 pm

   “Traditional games have become bloated with too much that isn’t really vital to the gameplay.”
   I find many games are, lacking, in incidental detail. Have fun playing Candy Crush Saga – I’ll be over here playing Grand Theft Auto V.

   “A lot of companies enter this space without truly having a sense of fun.”
   And a basic knowledge in Game Design.

   Reply