Like many of you, I awoke to news yesterday that Nintendo had cut the price of the 3DS by an unprecedented 32% in one fell swoop. Wired Magazine called it a “fire sale.”
More unprecedented was how quickly it happened; only four months after the 3DS launch. (NOTE: Nintendo’s other slow selling systems, N64 and GameCube, saw 25% price drops six months after launch. Virtual Boy was pulled after less than a year.)
Said Nintendo President Satoru Iwata following the shocking news, “While it has happened in the past that a game system would be reduced in price in order to increase sales, it has never happened in Nintendo’s history that a console would be reduced in price so drastically and after less than six months.”
What does this all mean? I’d say it’s one of the following:
