Nintendo not planning on dropping Wii U prices anytime soon

Get used to those price tags.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said the company plans to keep the Wii U at its current price point for quite a while. He said reducing the price of the 3DS shortly after launch was a "painful proposition" as it led to Nintendo's first operating loss as a publicly-traded company. The Wii, on the other hand, retained its original price point for years before getting dropped to lower levels.


Reggie:“The way that we approach consumer value is we want to make sure we give the consumer a lot for what they pay, and when you look at that basic model you get the innovation in the GamePad (and all of the gaming options that presents), you get Miiverse in terms of a gaming community, you get Nintendo TVii, you get video chat… all of that is included in the base proposition. We think $299 is a really strong value, and it’s a value that’s going to be strong for a long time.”

“That gets into another one of our pricing philosophies; we don’t believe in pricing a product and then having to reduce the price some short time later. When we had to do that for 3DS, it was a very painful proposition for us. And what we did with the Wii at $249 and leaving it there for, I think, about three and a half years is very much consistent with our pricing philosophy.”

“In terms of profitability, we don’t comment on our internal byproduct P&L, but as a philosophy, we believe in making money on our hardware, even if it’s small amounts of money at the start. We don’t believe in losing a lot of money on hardware. I brought up 3DS – after the price cut, we were losing money on 3DS hardware and that’s what led to our posting our first operating loss ever as a public company.”


Source: GamesIndustry.biz