Console Price Cuts Bringing Consumers Back to Gaming

The PlayStation 3 is cheaper and slimmer than it was at the beginning of the year. The Xbox 360 Elite also got a price cut to match that of the Sony home console. Even Nintendo lowered the price of the Wii to less than 200 dollars in order to attract new customers and stop the decline in sales it has been facing throughout this year.

But it's still not clear whether these price cuts, along with the videogames set to be released until the end of the year, manage to bring customers back into stores and reverse the sales slump that has affected the videogaming industry.

Brian Dunn, Chief Executive Officer of retail chain Best Buy, believes that there are signs of a rebound. Speaking at the Market Watch conference in New York, he said that “Consumers are back out spending again,” adding that “We are hiring more people for seasonal business. You are going to see us go deeper on inventory bets. I'm more optimistic today than I was in June.”

Most retail chains limited the depth of their inventories during the last Christmas shopping season and some publishers, like Electronic Arts, blamed this move as reducing their revenue and their end of the year profits. It seems that, this year, stores will be more oriented towards attracting a bigger number of potential customers to stores with promotions, coherent marketing efforts and full inventories.

Best Buy along with GameStop and other chains are also hoping that titles like Assassin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2, which already have a large established fan base, will drag up sales and that the hype surrounding their launches will mean a boost for the videogaming industry. The first signs of how the holiday shopping season is shaping up will appear when the NPD Group numbers for September come out.