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GameStop discusses Wii, DSi, and Euro price hikes
A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Bob McKenzie, senior vice president of merchandising…
GS: I don’t know if you might have not seen this, but there’s some news coming out of England that, at least over there, Nintendo’s raising the wholesale price of the Wii. Is that something that you foresee? Obviously you guys do business in Europe, and I think it’s just England because the pound’s weakening — is their justification. Do you see that as a trend in these economic times with currency devaluing, the yen being strong?
BM: It’s a good question. I don’t have a good perspective on the international [business]. Like you mentioned, that does make sense because the pound is weakening, that they would take an adjustment like that.
I guess I would see that as a pretty isolated opportunity and hopefully not something that we would see roll over with the U.S. market anyway.
I don’t think they need to make the price move down either, like on the Wii. I think finally we’ve gotten to the point where we’re going to be able to get a real good run rate on this thing.
You know, three years later, we finally have enough inventory on the shelf, and we’ve got a couple of weeks in supply of this. That’s good because we can finally determine and gauge it before we get into the fourth holiday season.
There’ve been enough games — last year, they launched 170-plus games for the Wii — so there’s a good enough install base with a lot of third-party support and a lot more to come.
They keep developing some new and innovative products; Wii Fit last year was great. Again, we weren’t sure if that was really going to be successful or not, and to be honest I don’t think Nintendo really knew how successful that would be.
Shortly after it came out and I had it at home, one of our neighbors knocked on the door one night; she wanted to come in — she knew we had it, and she said she wanted to see if her kids would like it — and five minutes later she’s up on top of the thing doing the soccer game, kicking soccer balls around.