No, this isn’t some whine about love’s labor lost, but my attitude towards the Nintendo Wii. Seriously, this thing’s been out for months, and you still can’t get one for the retail price at any store in Montreal (as far as I can tell). Ridiculous.
If Nintendo thinks it a good idea to artificially keep the price up on their latest toy and frustrating people who have jobs and money and (above all) better things to do than to roam in electronics stores all day waiting for a new shipment to come in, they’re in for a bad surprise. I for one have lost my enthusiasm for the quirky console, and I’m sure there are a lot more like me.
Obviously one console sale isn’t going to make or brake the Japanese giant, but the console is sold at a slight loss anyway. Where Nintendo is really losing out is in game sales, which they’re obviously not going to make to me. Now I work for a living, make a decent salary and I like to spend money on things like computer parts and games. I’m the target market for this console. I’m the guy who would have spent hundreds, maybe even thousands (well after a couple of years anyway) in game titles. But evidently that’s not going to happen because the Nintendo people are either unwilling or unable to produce at the rate the market demands.
Gaming consoles just aren’t elastic goods — goods for which the demand is constant. Look at the Playstation 3, for example. It’s available. It’s on store shelves. It sits there dejectedly because Sony — the “rape the consumer happy” electronics giant — just doesn’t get that people in Canada are fairly cool to the idea of shelling out $700 plus tax (a hefty 15%) for what is essentially a toy. A very sophisticated, very powerful, very sleek toy, but a toy nonetheless. In total that’s about $800 of after-tax money (meaning that in practical terms you had to earn about $1600 of gross revenue before you can even think about buying it). It has Blu-Ray! Big fucking deal. Blu-Ray is a Sony code word for “sell the DVD of this movie to this punter for twice what the normal DVD costs”. Consumers are seeing through the bullshit. Go over the $500 psychological barrier for game systems and you’ll end up with egg on your face.
But if you make a point of marketing your system with the right price point, making sure that you can actually provide the product is equally important.
Yes, the Wii is a very cool concept. But having wasted my time too many times going into stores to see if it was available, I’m evidently just not cool enough for it, if slobbering in anticipation for the opportunity to spend $350 on a machine that will mostly give me the opportunity to spend hundreds more on game titles can be considered to be “cool”.
Sometimes one can wonder whether the gaming companies aren’t the ones playing consumers for chumps. Well, in my case it no longer matters. I’m tilting this thing. Game over.