Can you feel that? As the festive gift giving time gets closer, the temperature rises in the battle for the consumer dollar. With price cuts to the Xbox 360 now a reality, and Sony standing firm and aloof over PS3 pricing, does the weight of competitive pricing now fall to Nintendo?
The streets are beginning to fill with frantic parents, friends and loved ones, all looking for the perfect gift for little Johnny, Sally or Aunty Flo.
So it is without question that large corporations are community minded enough to help out when it comes to the gift giving dilemma faced by many at this time of year. Microsoft announced yesterday that this altruistic company policy has resulted in across the board price cuts of the Xbox 360 gaming console.
As reported this week on iTWire , Microsoft dropped the Australian/New Zealand Xbox 360 range prices by as much as 20 percent, making the Xbox 360 Arcade model the cheapest next-gen hardware by around 25 percent over the next competitor the Nintendo Wii.
Meanwhile, over in the sunlight meadows of Sonyland, the PS3 remains comfortable in its pricing at AU$699. According to Michael Ephraim, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment Australia, said during a recent interview with the Sydney Morning Herald , comparing the "hobbled" Au$299 Xbox 360 Arcade to the PlayStation 3 was like comparing apples and oranges.
"If people want a completely stripped down cheap video game machine and that's it, then the low-end Xbox fits that market and that's not the market we're in," Ephraim said.
In the SMH interview, Xbox marketing manager Jeremy Hinton responded in kind;"You can buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 for less than a PS3, or you can buy an Xbox 360 and a stand-alone Blu-ray player for less than a PS3."
While the top brass at Microsoft and Sony puff out their chests and beat each other with a marketing lexicon, what of the third player in the game, Nintendo?
Well having cornered the sales market, Nintendo has every right to stand back, looking aloof and disinterested in the whole idea of a next-gen console price war. Basically what they are doing right now, even the latest sales figures bear this out.
In the U.S October figures show the Wii outselling nearest rival by over 2 to 1. NPD tells us:
• Wii - 803,000
• Nintendo DS - 491,000
• Xbox 360 - 371,000
• PSP - 193,000
• PlayStation 3 - 190,000
• PlayStation 2 - 136,000
So why bother with a price cut? Well logic does indeed dictate that there is no pressure to do so. But my prediction is that the pressure may indeed be rising, and post Christmas 2009 Nintendo may feel the first of this.
At over two years into this current generation of the console wars, who are the consumers left in the market to sell to?
Surely most hard-core gamers have what they want, or if anything would be considering an upgrade in the gaming hardware they have already (perhaps moving from an Xbox Pro to Elite or upgrade PC architecture for example), upgrading pretty much leaves the Wii out of contention.
Next up are more casual gamers, and though Nintendo are not concerned about Microsoft and Sony’s continued push for this demographic, both the Xbox 360 and PS3 (as a migration from traditional PS2 titles such as SingStar and Buzz attest) are attacking the casual gamer market with renewed vigour.
Nintendo has its current suite of software titles to cling to the casual demographic, and this will carry them forward for some time to come, but games such as Wii Music & Wii Sports Resort don’t hold the appeal of the older Wii games, and with a low attachment rate, even current Wii owners could start looking to the competition software for new fun.
Yes Nintendo are riding high, but come Q1/Q2 2009 it will be time for another patented Myiamoto Nintendo surprise or, yep, a price cut to hardware to shift the Wii phenomenon into overdrive.
Source : http://www.itwire.com/
