14 DAY TRIAL // With the PlayStation 3 Slim announced by Sony at Gamescon and confirmed as arriving on most markets on September 1, a lot of people are now wondering how Microsoft and Nintendo, the two rivals of the Japanese manufacturer, are preparing to respond to the new hardware unveiled and to the price cut attached to it. We might be in a position to see both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii shave 50 dollars off their prices before the end of the 2009, if we adopt the rather optimistic view.
In an e-mail sent to Gamasutra, Anita Frazier, who is an analyst working for the NPD Group, which puts out sales numbers every month for North America, says that “Based on history, price cuts generally increase month-over-month unit sales in the range of 40-60 percent.”
Using this number, one can predict that the new PlayStation 3 Slim, if not hampered by limited availability and other supply issues, will probably sell somewhere between 170,000 and 190,000 units during September.
It's not clear whether this increase will see the new hardware variant help the PS3 outsell the Xbox 360, which, in July, was reported to have sold 202,900 consoles. One could expect big sales of the new Sony hardware to limit the amount of money that can be spent on the Wii and on the Xbox 360, and we might just see a month with the PlayStation 3 ruling the North American hardware sales charts.
Microsoft might also be tempted to cut the price of its home console, in a responsive move that could help it sell more hardware. As most of you certainly remember, the Redmond-based company cut the prices of its gaming devices last September and another such move might not be feasible at the moment. As for Nintendo, it will probably take a few really bad months for the Wii to start thinking about shaving 50 dollars off the price of the motion-tracking console leader.