Nintendo: Don’t Expect a Wii Price Cut Soon

Anyone expecting a price drop for the Wii will have to keep on waiting for a while. Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, recently stated during a Nintendo post-earnings conference that there will be no price cuts for their current home console – at least for now.

He went on to make a point about the Wii’s current struggle with Wii sales, attributing it mostly to a lack of dynamic software to drive hardware sales. Admitting that Wii Music and Animal Crossing: City Folk didn’t make as big of a splash as the company had hoped it would, Iwata is very confident that this year’s big Nintendo releases of Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. He expects that these titles will rejuvinate the Wii sales market.

Attention was then brought to plans for Nintendo’s next console. Iwata went on to say, “We [don’t believe] we are currently approaching the end of a cycle and must start thinking about releasing the next piece of hardware at all, and so we are not setting a determination on how long this console should remain active.” However, he did admit that work was being done on the next console, but any kind of release information “is not something that will happen at any time in the near future.”

It had been widely speculated amongst analysts and media that a price cut for the Wii might be in the works to possibly drive up waning global sales, so it is nice to hear something about it from Nintendo’s end. Whether or not it was the news people wanted to hear about or not is another question.