Iwata on Wii Game pricing

He´s crazy, I rarely buy games at $50 and I´m sure many, many other people are like me. Unless it´s a MGS, DMC, FF or KH, I´d never buy a game at $50.

 

You completely gloss over my, and Iwata's, point.

$40 to start, and $40 to stay. Instead of $50 to start, and dropping to $20-30. It evens out in the end.

 

Not if the sales aren't consistent. In the price-drop model, if 60% of games are sold at the $30 pricepoint because those gamers are unwilling to spend more, if the price never drops below $40 you'll lose 60% of your potential sales.

Prices drop on software the same as everything else that becomes dated. At the time its new and attracts early adopters willing to pay a premium. Than the price drops towards something more mainstream, and ends up with budget releases to eek out a few more consumer dollars. Software is no different in this regard and I don't know why someone would want to overturn what decades, of not centuries, of open market economics has provien as the best way to maximise returns. If companies could make more money by never dropping prices, that would be the standard behaviour across the entire retail sector, and products would be priced now as they were at launch. How well would PS2 have done if the price never dropped below $300? How many sales would have been missed if the price never got below $200?

 

I know outside of a few AAA titles with extensive replay that all my other titles are in the $20-$30 range. I hate paying $50 or more for a game unless I know it is great and I will like it. Typically there are only 5ish titles a gen that fit that criteria.

 

I think a starting price of $40 (possibly $45) would do well at launch, and then once the titel has sold a certain amount it gets lower.

$40 launch price.

500,000 copies sold the price drops to $30.

1 million copies sold and it drops to $20.

I think a steady progression is a must actually. Keeping a price is good if its say $30, but I think more than that is a bit much myself. I often didnt buy console games till they were in the bargin bin before when I was still playing with consoles.

If the Wii games stay at say $40 then I wouldnt have to much trouble buying the big hits, but if all games follow that price and never drop then my library of games will become rather limited.

 

Precisely. I´ve got around 40 PS2 and GCN games, and of those, the only ones I bought at full price were FFX, MGS2 and 3, DMC1 and 3, SH2, DQVIII, Winning Eleven, Xenosaga, MP and Onimusha 3. 11 games. The rest were bought either through the Greatest Hits/Player´s Choice Line, discounts, pre owned, etc. Heck, I didn´t buy a single GCN game at full price other than MP (and it sucked ).

It´s questionable how many games I would have now if they all stayed at $50 ($40 is too cheap for Nintendo, they like the high price tags), but you can bet they wouldn´t be 40. 20, if that with a more limited genre selection (due to sticking to what you know). I personally find it strange really, Nintendo games during this gen have not been cheap, and DS games are expensive considering what they offer. I´d be willing to bet that this is just irritation on Iwata´s part on having to slash that $50 price tag at some point.

 

Didnt know that cheaper games are so popular.

Really cant see how will this be good for Nintendo or gamers unless games are cheap enought so gamers buy many and for nintendo sell games enought to make more proffit from both the same gamers and from new ones.

 

Iwata will not be selling any conventional 1st-party Nintendo published or produced Wii games at an increased nor reduced rate in comparison to their GC counterparts from this generation. (Mario, LOZ, DK, Starfox, MP, Pikmin, etc.) But offerings such as the visually simplistic Wii sports line, any educationally based software, cooking simulations, or what have you will definitely be offered at a premium price to entice the typically non-gaming enthusiast.

With that being said, games that sell for extended durations (& sometimes not even that) Nintendo simply will not drop price. MKD still at full price? On a dead console?

 

But if they are going to have more games (they already have 7 for launch window (and many more exclussives), and it is almost 1/2 of their big exclussives on GC) and keep them coming I cant see how will they sell them at a good rate unless they expect a really big market (which may not be able to suport high priced games), few sequels (so it does not happening someone "needs to chosse" between a similar games y or y2 at the same price but here y2 does have better gfx, more features, online etc...) and many of the (new) market must like Nintendo games. I find it very hard.

I guess other companys (Ubisoft, EA, Capcon...) will not follow it.

 

Yeah, remember how well that $99 GBA Micro sold? And how it's still $99?

As pc999 said, flooding the market with titles at a high price point could be counterproductive. Personally, I rarely buy new games. I didn't buy a single Xbox title new when I had one (had around 6 games), and of my 34 Cube games, only 8 were purchased new, but most of those were at full price. The thing is that if you wait around for a price drop, by the time you do, it's almost impossible to find the title new on the shelves, so you're more likely to pick up a used title anyway. As it stands, most games have an extremely short shelf-life before they're only available in the used bin. That would seem to explain why lots of games have almost all their sales in the first few weeks. A lower launch price could very well result in more people buying the game at full price rather than waiting for used copies to hit the bins (which can be a real crapshoot--there's no guarantee you'll find what you want).