Anyone else agree with my prediction? The Wii is over 2 years old now, and all through that time its price tag of $249.99 has not changed, even though the PS3 and 360 have seen massive cuts over the same period. This is an amazing accomplishment for Nintendo, who had major problems getting the GC to sell, and had to cut its price early and repeatedly. But it also made sense for Nintendo not to drop the price, because of the unheard of prolonged shortage that was in effect and is only now coming to an end.
I checked on Amazon a few weeks ago, and for the first time ever I was able to see Wiis in stock and available for sale from Amazon rather than from scalpers at an inflated price. We are also beginning to see Wiis staying on store shelves more often, so I think it is safe to say that the shortage is finally at an end. And so now that the shortage is at last out of the way, Nintendo can now begin considering dropping the price.
I predict they won't drop the price until after the Holidays, because demand is naturally going to be very high this time of year, and the shortage may rear its ugly head again for the next two months, but after that things are going to settle down again and most people who were willing to spend $249 for a Wii will probably already have done so at that point, so I predict sometime between mid-January and March Nintendo is probably going to cut the price of the Wii down to (hopefully) $199, and they might also consider new colors for the console, or even bundling more stuff with it in order to boost sales.
I also think at some point they are going to come up with a revision to the Wii hardware, and I predict this "Wiivision" will have a beefed up internal memory, because people like to bitch about that. So instead of 512 mb like it is now, they may quadruple that to 2gb or go even higher. They may also finally include the ability to play DVD movies, and maybe even find a way to have the sensor bar built into the console so you don't need the sensor bar to be a separate component.
I also think at some point Nintendo is probably going to drop the GC controller and memory card ports. They are going to do that to save money on the hardware costs, and also to discourage people from owning and playing GC games, which they are no longer seeing any profit from. Everyone at this point who ever owned a GC has probably already upgraded to the Wii, so it makes no sense for them to keep this ability.
Instead, they will probably release "Wiimakes" of all the best selling GC games, to make them work with the Wii-mote so people will be forced to repurchase them all over again and no longer rely on backwards compatibility to play them.
Anyways, these are some of my predictions for what Nintendo is going to be doing next year. Do you guys think my predictions will end up being correct? And if not, how do you think things will be?
Topic: I predict a Wii price drop will come after the holidays (Read 21352 times)
