mckmas8808 said:
It's not only about the price. Nintendo isn't selling the Wii below price value. Toshiba is artifically lowering the price of their players waaaaay to early.
This is a bullshit argument created by competition. No one has ever been scared away by drastically falling prices. The argument has always stemmed that lowering prices drastically causes the consumer to think fire sale and back away. The truth is that cases where drastically lowering prices has been followed by disinterest or even greater atrophy has always directly correlated with an inability to follow through.
People love to cite the DC mass price reduction, but then fail to mention the serious new release drought that immediately preceded it. People love to mention the GCN $99 price drop but then conveniently leave out that Nintendo never followed through with any sort of marketing or 3rd party push.
What happened when the first $50 DVD players were released when most name brands were still selling at $120? What happened when the first $99 players were released when most name brands were still coming in closer to $250? The Wii is mentioned here, yet nothing is said about the fact that the Wii has some seriously killer apps lined up behind it.
Fire sales don't kill products. Fire sales with nothing propping up the price tag kill products. And while HD-DVD is certainly lacking some big names this fall, they have a few of their own big names to counter it. I'm not defending or supporting the format war, but this talk of Toshiba hurting HD-DVDs position by positioning affordable hardware is just outright stupid. Being able to walk into Best Buy and grabbing a player plus 3-4 movies and going home to watch them for under $300 is in no possible way a bad thing. And having to pay $500 to say the same thing about a blu-ray player and movies in no way shape or form makes it inherently better. Let's at least try to use some common sense in this argument.
mckmas8808 said:
Because if the company loses too much money the product that I want to buy from them may cease to exist!!!
I think that's a good enough reason. What about you?
a) this entire war is about subsidies
b) Why do you honestly think one side or the other would do something that would directly hurt them and cause them to fold? If/when HD-DVD goes down, $99 and $199 players won't have a single damn thing to do with it.