Dear Reader:
Analysts say May price cut for Wii could lead to hardware announcement at E3, Pachter disagrees
“Most video game companies withhold their biggest announcements until E3 and if Nintendo chooses to announce a Wii price drop before their E3 press conference, they must have something much bigger to announce. There are very few announcements that would eclipse a hardware price cut.” - EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich
“Wii is certainly due for a price cut, which would be good for Nintendo and for retailers. A Q2 price cut announcement would typically be an E3 event, so scheduling a cut before E3 would clear the boards for another, bigger announcement. A new console would be pretty exciting, but it’s a lot riskier for a vendor with a large active installed base to launch next generation and keep last generation’s base active while the other vendors are still building out. Next generation timing and strategy is going to be interesting.” - M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon
“There is no way that anyone outside of Nintendo Japan would know about this until print ads have to be submitted for retailers, probably at most three weeks prior to the cut. I don’t believe that the source is right. With that said, I think a cut in September is likely, unless Microsoft cuts earlier. Nintendo will not lead price cutting, Wii is still selling pretty well (close to 1 million a month), so why cut profits until sales drop below 500,000 a month? I don’t see it.” - Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities
You can’t win with Pachter, can you?! You hear about rumored price cuts, and now Pachter doesn’t want to jump in on the fun! We showed you a Kmart release date sheet last night that also called for a Wii price cut, so the evidence is piling up. Could a pre-E3 price cut for Wii really mean something bigger to be discussed at the show?