Iwata: No Blockbuster Titles Doesn't Mean Wii Price Cut

Price cut not looking likely shocker!

Posted by Staff
Satoru Iwata
Satoru Iwata
Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, has reiterated what the company has already said about the lack of Wii sales in the first financial quarter of this year - that's April, May and June.

At least this is what we can glean from a translated version of Iwata's responses during a recent investor call. The Google translation of the call is, as ever, interesting and can be found here.

Iwata was asked about price cutting the Wii. Until we can get our Japanese people out of bed - or Nintendo puts up an English translation - the gist of Iwata's spoken response is that there's no need for a hardware price cut because that's not slowing Wii sales. A lack of software sales due to few blockbuster titles is the reason.

Wii Sports Resort, with its late June launch in Japan and July launch everywhere else, was too late to play a part in Nintendo's figures for the last quarter. Had it come a month or two earlier, the financials might not have looked so damn dismal.

Anyway, to get (nearly) back to the question he was asked, Iwata said, "Right now, there aren't a lot of discussions going on about what exactly to do about hardware pricing."

As we say, we'll wait for the English translation.
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Comments

Wii 5 Aug 2009 05:22
1/1
Is this a ship wreck waiting to happen. A cheap hardware at a price, non blockbusting hardware, no common HDTV, attracting few block buster programs (many these days requiring a certain level of hardware). Stuff i was indicating at (and probably before) the release fo the Wii, lost in the clouds, depending much on the motion controller features (but motion control is not the only things that makes the game). Ocean liner Nintendo coming in...

I can tell you, that they are probably planning to ride out a price reduction till latter, hardware revision, or new hardware. Who thinks that the next hardware version will be little more than an upgrade of the Wii (Game cube) with lots of integrated ImgTech general purpose GPU's. This would fit in with their low powered low cost ambition (the Wii can be shrunk to an IC and the GPU's take over, maybe with Arm controllers).
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