Having rennovated their headquarters with bricks made from wads of money, Nintendo have decided to raise the price of the Wii in the UK, citing depreciation of the pound.
Call me cynical - pernickety, even - but I feel the need to poke a few holes in their fiscal policy. Nintendo are alone amongst the big three in never having made a loss on their current-gen hardware, and have sold far more consoles than either of its rivals. Not only that, but they haven't yet needed to drop the price of the Wii, and have reduced the cost of hardware production by forty-five percent. In other words, Nintendo have been shitting out gold bullion from day one while Sony and Microsoft were scrabbling for spare pennies down the sofa to afford a few more hard drive units. The only possible danger to Nintendo is that the amount of cash they are making might be downgraded from 'obscene' to 'staggering'.
While the DS continues to play home to some truly excellent handheld titles, I can forgive Nintendo a lot of things. But raising the price of existing hardware models is a pretty naff precedent. Sony eviscerated the PS3 one year into its life span while Microsoft settled for charging obscene amounts of money for proprietory hardware, but losing money on every console they sold is a not entirely unreasonable excuse for doing so, and they have never upped the price on a model. Please guys, don't be the first to set a bad example.
Call me cynical - pernickety, even - but I feel the need to poke a few holes in their fiscal policy. Nintendo are alone amongst the big three in never having made a loss on their current-gen hardware, and have sold far more consoles than either of its rivals. Not only that, but they haven't yet needed to drop the price of the Wii, and have reduced the cost of hardware production by forty-five percent. In other words, Nintendo have been shitting out gold bullion from day one while Sony and Microsoft were scrabbling for spare pennies down the sofa to afford a few more hard drive units. The only possible danger to Nintendo is that the amount of cash they are making might be downgraded from 'obscene' to 'staggering'.
While the DS continues to play home to some truly excellent handheld titles, I can forgive Nintendo a lot of things. But raising the price of existing hardware models is a pretty naff precedent. Sony eviscerated the PS3 one year into its life span while Microsoft settled for charging obscene amounts of money for proprietory hardware, but losing money on every console they sold is a not entirely unreasonable excuse for doing so, and they have never upped the price on a model. Please guys, don't be the first to set a bad example.
