Nintendo Slashes Profit Forecast and 3DS Price

Daetrin writes "Nintendo has announced a large loss for the first quarter of the year and lowered its annual profit forecast. In the three months prior to June 30th Nintendo lost 25.5 billion yen ($328 million) and the forecast is being reduced about 80%, from 110 billion yen ($1.4 billion) to 20 billion yen ($257 million). Nintendo is blaming poor sales of the 3DS and is responding by announcing a price cut from $250 to $170 on August 12. In order to mollify early adopters of the system Nintendo also announced that anyone who has logged into the Nintendo eShop before the price cut will receive 10 free NES games and 10 free GBA games. The GBA games won't be available until later in the year, but Nintendo claims they will be exclusive to the '3DS Ambassadors' and will not be available for purchase on the store in the future." A related op-ed at Wired suggests the new price is still too high, given the rise of cheap portable games on various app stores.

Re:My opinion

[Moryath]

You've just named the precise reasons that the original Game Boy beat its competitors:

- Better battery life (as in a USABLE battery life)
- Better games

3DS has nothing in the way of a "killer app", the screen issues are still problematic, and I know of nobody willing to pay that much for a portable device for gaming. Then again, I also remember the fiasco that was the original GBA, which didn't even have a backlight and couldn't be played without arranging a ton of lamps like some professional fucking photography studio [penny-arcade.com]. It was downright hilarious when I saw someone take apart their GBA SP and they discovered that Nintendo had literally ripped off the Afterburner design for their own GBA lighting system.

Early adopter

[Daetrin]

As one of those early adopters, i have to say that i knew what i was getting into when i chose to wait in line to get my hands on a 3DS the first day. Anyone who does so without considering the possibility of an initially slow release schedule and possible price cuts is a fool. (Not to mention first run hardware bugs and in rare cases the possibility that the device will bomb in the market completely and be discontinued.)

And i, like many other people, was expecting that Nintendo was going to have to cut prices before the holiday season in order to compete effectively with the unexpectedly cheap Playstation Vita.

However i do have to admit that i wasn't expecting the price cuts to be this deep and this early. Maybe $250 was a little high, and $170 certainly doesn't seem like an unreasonable point for competing against the $250/$300 Vita, but it seems like perhaps two separate price cuts would have been in order. One down to $200 or $210 now, and then another price cut announced right before the release of the Vita.

But before too many other early adopters start complaining about how they're getting ripped off, remember that Sony had some pretty tough times in the early months (years?) of the PS3 launch, and at the time people were lambasting them for not cutting the price of the PS3. So which do you want? A company that responds when market conditions seem to warrant it, or one that sticks to the initial price point come hell or high water? (And all the trolls going on about how this means Nintendo is clearly doomed, note that Sony did eventually recover from those early problems. Nintendo certainly isn't out of the game yet.)