Wii Not Life Sustaining, Price Drop Unlikely

Ever since November 19th, 2006 people have been buying up Wii’s like they were necessary to sustain life. As it turns out, they aren’t. Which is good since it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing a price drop anytime soon, not that one is necessary, $249 keeps it competing with the Xbox 360 and PS3, both of whom had significant price drops in order to compete.

This news comes from Nintendo itself, shortly after a bit of news about manufacturing costs dropping around 45% for the Wii. The issue is that although the costs to make the system have gone down, world economics have come into play, the Yen is still as strong as it ever was meanwhile the rest of the world’s money has dropped in value, most significantly in the US and Europe. Basically it’s costing Nintendo more money to export the system now, than it did before, nearly negating the savings found in the raw components of the system. Whether it’s time for a price drop or not should be determined when Nintendo releases their next quarterly earnings statement.

Back to the part about the Wii not being necessary to sustain life, according to Nielsen (oh how we love the Nielsen families) the Wii gets the least attention in a given household. The downside to taking a pastime generally associated with laziness and trying to make it more physical is that after a short period of time, people want to go back to being lazy. The study that showed such a drastic difference in play time between the systems took place in December of last year and found that the Wii was worth roughly 6.8% of its player’s time. The Xbox 360 and PS3, both systems you can play while sitting on your bum, netted about 10% of a given player’s time. As a 360 fan I’m sad to say the PS3 won out with a marginally higher 10.6% compared to the Xbox’s 10.2%. So go play with your Wii some more, that’s something your mother will never tell you to do…

Source (Nielsen)

Source (Price)