It depends the only really commercially viable on the game that would sway people is smash brothers. You have to wonder if that and the bundles are enough. Smash Brothers is awesome but for $50 more you can get a much more support system that comes with two or three games.
There's nothing on the Xbone that's anything like Smash Bros. People buying the Wii U for Smash Bros this holiday are doing it because they love playing Smash Bros and want the newest installment. Plus for many, Smash Bros will end up giving them way more hours of gameplay in the end anyway making just that one game a better value then 2-3 Xbone games anyway.
What both of these arguments are lacking is Nintendo Stubbornness. In general Nintendo doesn't really do Price drops and has a good amount of exclusives. You can be pretty confident, 3DS as the exception, that if you buy Nintendo Console Hardware you won't be seeing a price drop are a real better iteration later.
MS not so much. By now its a good chance you have on in the PS360 combo and that will get you still the majority of new releases. That will not be changing anytime soon. There is still a very good arguments the smart move is to wait till it reaches a critical mass of games for you.
Since when? They aggressively dropped the price on SNES, N64, and Game Cube all to match their competition, Wii has blinded people into thinking that fluke is how it always was. Nintendo can not sell Wii U's at $300 when Xbox one, a new, more powerful next gen system with a rising library of games is fifty dollars more. You know they are having this discussion in board meetings right now, Smash Bros. is a big seller to Nintendo fans, but that game alone is not going to be the savior of the Wii U its going to be just like Game Cube, a big holiday sales rush and then sales falling off a cliff. By this point in Game Cubes life the price was already down to $99 and they were aggressive with their bundles, because MS was doing these types of aggressive bundles and price drops. Nintendo fans, or a certain segment of them, might not think Microsoft and Nintendo are competing for the same audience but their investors, and the game developers all know better.
Nintendo might hide a price drop in aggressive bundles, at first but there is no way an official one doesn't fallow suit right away.
I am willing to bet money on it, I will GIFT an eshop game of your choice if I am wrong, anyone takes me up on it does the same for me. They WILL drop the price before December first, most likely in a big bundle that is priced the same as the regular set but comes with enough crap to get the core unit down to the hidden new price, then right after the official price drop.
As much as I want Smash Bros. to be the system seller that turns Wii U into the viable machine everyone wants it to be, it won't it will be another Mario Kart, it will have big sales for a few weeks then no new major games for months and it drops off. The games that are coming have Nintendo fan appeal and those guys are all one the fence waiting for that one more game, most who held off this long its Smash, the rest its Zelda, everyone else needs more than five games to play to justify a $300 machine, and right now theres not that many that have mass appeal.
Hate them all you want, Madden, Call of Duty, Fifa, NBA Live, these games have mass appeal, and there are dozens of them out now or coming soon to the other two, there is nothing coming to Wii U outside of Smash and some really quirky Nintendo games that have limited appeal to mostly kids, and die hard Nintendo fans, and people with families. Xbox sucks at that last market Sony does not. Now what could force Nintendo's hand is if Sony went for the kill and also dropped the price of the PS4, which lets be realistic is not past them doing if they want to get aggressive which they just might especially if they think they can take Japan away from Nintendo.
1) I don't think anyone expects Smash Brothers to do (much) better than MarioKart for Wii U.
2) I'd eat my hat if EA ever comes back to Wii U, even in gimped form. They've already made the business decision that it's not profitable for them to bother sending-out their PS3/Xbox 360 ports to die on Wii U. As they focus primarily on PS4/Xbox One, they're absolutely not going to spend time porting a game made specifically for more powerful hardware to a weaker console that shows little promise to get a ROI.
I never said anything about EA coming back so where is that coming from? I was using those games as examples there are dozens of NON-EA games you could point to so thats a weak reply to my point, the point was those machines have games with mass appeal, Wii U does not,
3) I think it's even LESS likely to see a price drop by PS4 than Nintendo. They have absolutely no reason to drop the price, when they're outselling Xbox by 40%. People already see a value proposition for the PS4 at a $400 price point, but they clearly don't see the same value in Microsoft's console, even if the differences are marginal.
Truthfully, in the several years I've casually followed the video game market, a price drop alone has done little to bolster the sales of a system or handheld. It would need to be on-top of a system that has a lot of compelling games & features, and put the price at a threshold where it could be considered a potential impulse buy. I don't see $350 being that point for Microsoft, even with Master Chief Collection & Sunset Overdrive.
Price drops have also come when console makers get desperate, you do realize that also? No they don't always have the affect of massive increased sales but that isn't the goal the goal is market perception. If the market sees the newer machine is only $50 more than the older machine then the market, the retailers and the industry executives and the potential consumers, are going to get it in their heads that the Wii U is not as valuable and therefore they will have to drop the price, not to increase sales but to stop Xbox from taking market share and mind share away from their potential customers. Video games are just like any other business so just studying a few examples from the past 35 years of major gaming industry is not enough to get a full picture, unless you remove everyone but the few major players, then you might maybe have a picture. BUT economics and business as a whole are the same no matter what industry and its not just can Nintendo afford to take a loss on the machine, nobody said that we don't know what that thing costs to make, plus its been over a year since they discontinued the other Wii which no doubt has had some impact on the production costs because their plants only have so many resources to go around, the final cost of the machine is NOT just related to the costs of materials and labor there are R&D factors and the cost of starting up a new assembly line, those costs have no doubt been recouped by now, or damn near close otherwise they wouldn't have dropped the price last time they did nor would they be ramping up production for a NEW console, the New 3DS.
What I do know is that from a business perspective Nintendo cannot afford to lose ground to Xbox One right now in retailers or mindshare, so they will need to do something to match Microsoft, Wii U is barely selling better than Game Cube who had already had aggressive price drops and bundles at this point in life.
They will most likely hide the price drop in bundles, then officially drop the price right after. They aren't sitting on brisk sales right now either. Smash Bros. has the potential to out sell Mario Kart but not by much, if it even does that, the handheld version could cannibalize sales we don't know yet how that will play out. There is a real chance Smash Bros. U will bomb up front as the larger userbase is content with the handheld and can wait for a price drop on the game, which people here have indicated they will do and I hear it at games tores too, so there is a chance that Nintendo could be preparing for a performance similar to Super Mario 3D World, something that would not reinviggerate their investors or their customers. Nintendo has been able to sell on good will for as long as they could, that good will is spent they need to start delivering now and yes they have a few games, three at my count, that people would be tempted to play but that does not change the fact the other two have dozens more games to play and in economics value added will affect customers minds more than total cost, people will see Xbox as a value because its only fifty dollars more but you get greater potential which undermines what Nintendo is able to do.
Still its not like anyone can prove what will happen so lets just leave it there. Sony is the one who really needs to keep an eye on this, because Sony might not want to give MS a fighting chance they could decide its better to keep MS from getting a footing to mount a solid comeback, Sony is betting their entire future on PS4 so I put money on them being aggressive in their response. Which will force Nintendo's hand like it or not, and they won't want to but they cannot afford to have retailers remove their product entirely to make room for more Xboxes, that did happen with Game Cube which is why the aggressive price drops happened in the first place, retailers will not stock Wii u if it stops selling or if Xbox picks up and Wii U stays the same or slows down. Smash will be abundant but what about Captain Toad, or NES Remix, those games might be limited releases retailers might not see much incentive to stock them if the system isn't selling and MS is desperate because this will hurt them too if they can't start moving machines and unlike Nintendo MS could buy out K-Mart if they had to and then give them a major retailer whereas Nintendo loses good will with retailers then they have a harder time, especially when they are increasingly dependent on digital sales.
Topic: XboxOne ~News/Rumor/Speculation~ Biggest Console Released This Gen!! (Read 791024 times)
