Analysts believe early Wii price cut could mean big E3 announcement, Pachter doubts rumor
This information comes from EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich…
“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.”
This information comes from M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon…
“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.”
Let’s not get too excited, though. Remember, any sort of price cut has not been confirmed in the slightest. In fact, Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities believes that the rumor is fake:
“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.”
