Kintaro said:
No, no it's not. They want people to pay full price for their games.
They also want to see sustained YoY and MoM growth, be so wildly successful that they aren't even really in competition with Sony and Microsoft, never have to drop the price of their hardware, and continue to sell on the back of a single guaranteed first-party hit every year without ever needing to scramble for sales or reach out to third-parties. It's nice to want things.
It's true that there's a pathological pattern with a lot of games on, say, the HD systems where they're released, there's an orgy of purchasing upfront, and then interest drops off so precipitously that the price needs to fall by 60% or more in order to even clear out the first shipment of stock. That's bad because it trains retailers not to stock games, users not to buy games at full price, and publishers to treat their back catalog as disposable because every game sells its LTD in two months tops.
Like plenty of other situations, though, Nintendo have recognized a real problem and then enacted the absolute stupidest possible answer about how to fix it. A big part of the reason that these titles fall in price is that
most consumers are not actually interested in paying $50 for the majority of software they purchase. This is what creates the burgeoning used market and contributes to those price drops in the first place. If you cultivate a culture of disposability like on the HD systems, you get uncontrolled, immediate pricedrops and that's certainly bad. But controlled pricedrops, a long time after a game's release (like a minimum of one year) aren't going to train anyone to "wait it out" (if you can wait over a year to play a game cheaper, you weren't ever going to buy it at full price anyway) while still giving you the benefit of a lower-price offering.
By taking a hard-line against offering
any discounted software (something they've never done before), Nintendo cuts off their nose to spite their face. It means that budget-conscious shoppers (a large portion of Wii owners) will
have turn to used software or third-party bombas to get games for <= $20. It means that new buyers can't easily bring home a good library of sold-as-new software with their system (compare to the PS2, where the Greatest Hits line encouraged lots of people to buy red-stripe titles instead of used-bin scrounging when they bought a system late in the cycle.)
Basically, it's easy to identify the software that should actually stay at $50 because it
continues to sell well over time at that price. It makes perfect sense to keep NSMBW and MKW and WSR at $50 basically forever and to avoid "replacing" them with "upgrade" versions of the same software so they can continue to sell them. It
doesn't make any sense whatsoever to keep Metroid Prime, Fire Emblem, Twilight Princess, etc. off of the market altogether and guarantee these titles will never ever make Nintendo another dime when they could be serving as a slate of introductory software and buoying both software and hardware sales instead.
Or, shorter me:
donny2112 said:
It's true for evergreen titles. Not the games I'm talking about (e.g. Zelda: TP, Wario Ware, Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3). smh
Nintendo is never going to make another single dollar on Twilight Princess until the end of time unless they release it as a Player's Choice cheap-o title, and doing so will not reduce the sales of Zelda Wii in any way as the games don't directly replace one another (in fact, in some cases such a release will actually help sales of later games, the way God of War 1's GH release massively increased interest in, and sales of, the sequel.)
