Well it’s been a while since my last post, so for you, dear reader, I am making another.
The launch details of the Nintendo Wii were announced today: November 19 at $250. I’m a little disappointed. I was really hoping for a $200 price point. Not that it matters, I’d get it either way, and they’ll probably drop the price next year (or maybe they’ll wait till 2008 for the first price drop I really don’t know). And it’s bundled with Wii Sports, which.. I don’t really care about. The launch date also doesn’t mean much to me—I won’t be getting mine until December 25—but it seems like they should have beaten Sony’s launch date (on yours truly’s birthday) of November 17, especially since Nintendo (unlike Sony) can ship enough systems to meet demand. But here’s my biggest disappointment: getting a second controller (like, a fully functional one) is sixty dollars (forty dollars for Wiimote, twenty for the nunchuck attachment). Sure, I’m still not going to be spending as much as I would on, say, a PS3 with no games or accessories or anything. But as long as I’m going to have Wii Tennis I’d like to be able to play it with my wife, without having to spend more money on her controller than I would on a new game.
I apologize if my thoughts are overly disorganized. I am feeling quite under the weather and debating whether or not I should tell my boss that I’m taking off the rest of the day as a sick day. I’m certainly not in a state of mind for something requiring the level of concentration of, let’s say, refactoring a O(n2) algorithm down to a O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm (what I was working on before taking a ten minute break to blog). But I’ve never taken time off for sickness and I probably won’t unless it’s the kind of sickness where I need to be in or near a sanitary bathroom for an extended period of time.
September 14, 6:39 pm
Sorry you don’t feel well. I was a bit surprised by the pricing too. It’ll be strange to have to buy the Wii-mote ($40) and the nunchaku ($20) separately. I figure Nintendo feels as though they can finally compete with the other consoles, so they might as well push for a faster profit.
September 15, 7:08 am
Yeah, the more I think about it, this is probably an “early adopter tax.” Sure, they’ll sell a few less units than they would at $200, but (if my math/economics are right) as long as they lose no more than 25% of what they’d have sold at $200, they’ll make a bigger profit at $250. Then over the next year, the non-gamer market they want to tap into will actually see the Wii in action, and then they can announce a huge price drop next year to appeal to them. Despite Nintendo’s talk about targeting the casual gamers, I don’t think many of them would even know about the Wii at launch. I think the DS went through a similar thing, with low sales the first year, but much bigger sales after it had proven itself. But then again, I don’t consider myself to be very good at predicting these kinds of things, so we’ll see.
September 15, 2:33 pm
It looks like the Wii will be profitable at release, unlike anything Microsoft has done (both XBox’s lost money out of the box) and the PS3. I say, good for Nintendo. They’re clearly headed in the right direction, I think. I’ll probably buy a Wii. I mean, how can you say no to Duck Hunt 2?
September 19, 12:53 pm
I’d bet Nintendo will still make profit at 200 bucks a pop. They almost always make money on their hardware. I think they still make a profit on the GC being like 100 bucks. Makes you wonder why the other companies can’t seem to do it. $250 is what I predicted it to be, but I wouldn’t be surprised either if it gets dropped to $200. I do think the controllers should be a bit cheaper though. Maybe 50 bucks for a nunchaku / wii-mote combo. I think that’d work for me. I was glad to hear that they aren’t going to raise the price of 1st party games like the other people. And I also am not super excited about Wii Sports or anything, but I understand it’s attraction. It’s got a lot of good examples for using the new controller to play games with - good analogues and so forth, but I’m still interested in playin’ some Tennis or something. I’m definitely pre-ordering it.
I don’t think that the not-beatin-Sony thing will matter much. They’re only gonna have 400,000 units for the US on launch date anyway, so that seems like you’d have a hard time getting one even if you wanted one.