As you have probably heard on numerous gaming sites today, Nintendo plans to drop its Nintendo 3DS price from $249.99 to $169.99, a whopping 80 dollars, on the very close date of August 12. Additionally, early adopters of 3DS will receive a whopping 20 games (10 NES classics and 10 GBA games), half of which (the GBA games) supposedly won't be sold at a later date to others (I'm calling bull on this already). Why would Nintendo do something like this when it never has in the past?
It's simple, really - the 3DS wasn't really doing too hot. Nintendo also reported earnings for its last fiscal year and they confirmed that sales were abysmal, losing millions of (projected) dollars. How did this happen to a company like Nintendo, a company that released the Wii, the nearly impossible to find system for over a year? There are a few reasons floating around the Internet that stuck out to me in particular.
The first idea floating around is the crappy marketing Nintendo did for its less-informed customers. Tell me, if you heard a new handheld called the 3DS was coming out with no other information, wouldn't you assume it was an add-on to the original DS? The other revisions to the original DS hardware all got fancy names - DS Lite, DSi, and the DSiXL - so why wouldn't the pattern hold? Nintendo barely even mentioned in its marketing that the system was actually a generational step up for the power of the handheld, only focusing on the new 3D elements in its ads. To them, the name was more important and they took a gamble on it, one that didn't exactly pay off.
Most troubling is the eerie similarities to the way the Wii U has been handled so far. When showing the new system at E3, there were several people I saw that thought the new controller was the whole thing! Would you really blame them? Nintendo didn't really show much of the small box running the games in the background, focusing entirely on the new controller and its capabilities. Add in the very similar name (an identical name grab) and the system could run into the same problems. Hopefully Nintendo pays attention to the earlier mistakes and markets this thing right.
The other, more obvious reason why the 3DS probably failed was the lack of quality games released for it in the four and a half months of its life so far. Other than a few stand-out games (Ocarina of Time and Street Fighter IV), most of the titles have been either terrible or inconsequential. Nintendo announced a very exciting lineup of games when they announced the date at E3 last year but have only delivered a few of those games so far. Most people I know who wanted a 3DS decided to wait for more games to come out before they got one, including me. A console won't sell without games to make it a worthwhile purchase and the 3DS's most promising title so far is a game that has been played to death already.
This sudden price drop was a surprising move from Nintendo but one I feel will help them the most in the long run. By lowering the price right around the time when games start to come out in droves again, they may lure a lot more people in on the promise of a new shiny toy.
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