Industry Gamers has a
short piece up about the
Wii price cut that Engadget rumored last night. Basically, the supposed May 15th cut to $150 is weird because it comes well before E3, which analysts are guessing means Nintendo has something big planned for their E3 conference.
Of course I'd take all of this with a brick of salt, but I must say I'm tempted to speculate. In my opinion the Wii should've dropped to $150 years ago, but if it still sells Nintendo will still charge as much as the public is willing to pay for it. I've previously speculated that Nintendo would launch a successor console to the Wii long before Microsoft and Sony rolled out their next hardware, mostly because Kinect and Move are extending their respective consoles' lifespans and Wii has no such analog, and Wii is looking pretty long in the tooth to boot.
But at this E3? I didn't expect a Wii successor announcement until next year at the earliest. The Industry Gamers piece does make a good point: why would Nintendo undercut sales of a current console with the announcement of a new one? It seems odd until you remember that Nintendo did something similar with the DSi XL release and 3DS announcement, and even farther back they had the Gamecube, GBA SP and original DS all selling strong at the same time. Of course Chuck's "favorite" analyst Michael Patcher seriously doubts that news this big would've been leaked, but then again, the 3DS wasn't exactly a well-kept secret--leaks eventually forced Nintendo's hand in announcing it prior to the launch of the DSi XL, another awkward situation to say the least.
