Does the price really matter? At one end, the answer seems to be yes. After all, Amazon has announced that it will have some issues shipping all the PlayStation 3 Slim consoles that have been pre-ordered, at the same time limiting each consumer to one purchase, and Microsoft has been very quick to cut the price of the Xbox 360 Elite to the same level as that of the new Slim.

At the other end, the Nintendo Wii is no longer the cheapest videogame console on the market, yet still manages to outsell both its rivals month after month as the industry overall shows ever worse performances when compared to 2008.

Jesse Divnich, analyst, NPD Group, explains the early success enjoyed by Nintendo, “Essentially, Nintendo stole potential PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consumers from this hardware lifecycle three years in advance. In order to maintain this position Nintendo should drop their Wii console down to $199, not because the current Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 pricing structure poses a threat; rather, because they will eventually pose a threat.”

Another analyst, Stern Agee, believes that October would be a perfect moment for Nintendo to announce its price cut, mainly because it allows the company to see the impact of the cuts made by Sony and Microsoft while also offering a new price point before the holiday shopping season, which the Japanese console manufacturer has dominated for the last few years, really begins.

The latest NPD Group sales numbers for North America, those for July, have shown a Nintendo Wii rapidly losing steam as the Xbox 360 is seeing a far smaller decline. The causes for the closer than ever competition might be the attraction that the Xbox 360 Arcade has a 199-dollar price tag or it may just be that summer is slow for Nintendo.