Nintendo to keep Wii, DS prices unchanged

Nintendo Co. Ltd. on Friday announced that it has no plan to cut the prices of its gaming consoles, Wii and DS handheld players, anytime soon.

Video game hardware typically sees price cuts after the first year of release. However, Nintendo has kept the Wii price unchanged since its launch in November 2006. Nintendo has so far sold close to 24 million units worldwide.

The motion-sensitive Wii sells for $249 while the DS retails for $129 in United States. Wii is selling for 25,000 yen while DS sells for 16,800 yen in Japan.

On the other hand, Sony lowered the price of its PlayStation 3 with a 20-gigabyte hard drive by 20% to 49,980 yen ($479) before the product launch in late 2006 and slashed it further to 44,980 yen last year to boost demand.

Microsoft also has slashed price of Xbox 360 in US, Europe and Australia in order to keep its pace with rival console makers. It has dropped price of the 20-gigabyte Xbox 360 system from US$399 to US$349 in its home market. Besides shaving the price of its high-end version of gaming consoles, the software titan has also reduced the estimated retail price of its cheaper "core" package by US$20 to US$279 and its higher end "Elite" package by US$30 to US$449.

But, Nintendo said that it has no intentions to discount the Wii home video game console or the Nintendo DS handheld in the near future. "Our earnings projection for the year is not based on hardware price cuts, and I don't think we are going to need them," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata confirmed in an analyst meeting on Friday.

Over the past many months, Nintendo’s Wii has been enjoying big win over its arch-rivals in the gaming industry. The Japanese console maker competes with Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp in the global videogame industry.

Both Sony and Microsoft are trying hard to enable their gaming consoles, PS3 and Xbox 360 respectively, to compete more effectively against Wii, but the Tokyo-based electronics and entertainment conglomerate Nintendo is leading all the way with its Wii video games console, the least expensive of the so-called next-generation consoles.

According to fresh sales results provided by market research firm NPD Group, Nintendo's Wii home video game system was the best-selling video game console in March in the United States after selling 721,000 units, 67 percent more than in February.

US gamers bought Microsoft’s 262,000 Xbox 360 units in March, while Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 consoles managed 257,000 units.

Besides the next-gen gaming console market, Nintendo also dominated the portable system market. In the hand-held category, sales of the Nintendo DS that was launched in November of 2004 hit 698,000 in March, ahead of Sony's PlayStation Portable, or PSP, with 297,000 units.