No Price Drop for Wii

Satoru Iwata, President and SEO of Nintendo, has confirmed that they have no plans to follow the example of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and cut the price of either the DS or Wii in the near future.

With the Wii still flying off the shelves and beating the other 2 next-gen offerings into second and third place in the console market it seems the demand for the the little white box is continuing to stay high. Recently Nintendo have had to step up production of the console to meet the massive American demand, while I'm sure everyone remembers UK shops completely selling out for Christmas 2006, and then again in 2007! Iwata stated their earning projections are not based on hardware price cuts, is this a polite way of saying they're making loads of money why on earth would we reduce the price? We might not be seeing any price cuts but is it feasible we'll see Nintendo copying it's DS hardware sales and release different colours? Probably not, but something of the same ilk may not be out of the question.

Meanwhile the DS continues to grow in strength, competing with the PSP in the handheld market, but frankly offering quite different products with the PSP's focus on big titles ported into it and the music, video and internet features and the DS with dedicated titles, the touch pad and learning/"non-game" titles.

Why has Nintendo been able to launch itself into the so called "next generation" market of consoles so succesfully? Well they've managed to pick up on new demographics (wii fit has just been released, probably targetting the Kawashima crowd) while still maintaining the interest of more serious gamers, plus keeping the strength of Nintendo franchises like Mario Kart and Zelda consistently high. But like other gamers who own more than one console it is tempting to see a lack of depth in the Wii and its games, offering fantastic and entertaining titles but that don't quite offer the depth that you get from a COD4, for example. Plus don't forget it doesn't pack the graphical or processing punch that the 360 or PS3 do and so won't be seeing any of the big name releases like GTA IV, which in the long terms might damage it. This said, Zelda was good, Mario Kart will continue to entertain for many months and there's some big titles on the horizon like super smash brothers. Nintendo might be able to continue to play the market well and we might see people choosing between a Wii60 or a PSWii, and continue to dominate the console market.