I'm a faithful reader of the Dubious Quality blog because of his studious observation of the game industry.  On occasion his opinions can been seen in some of my blogs posts.  In his most recent article about Gabe Newell's DICE presentation in which Newell talks about his experimentation with pricing on Steam.  With no surprise as prices dropped on Steam, sales increased.  By dramatically dropping the price of Left 4 Dead on Steam they saw an increase by 3000% percent.

As impressive as this is what really caught my eye about this article is DQ's observation about how the Wii games vs 360/PS3 games and Wii console vs 360/PS3 in sales.  The Wii came out at $249 (still at that price too) which was $150 cheaper than the preferred Xbox 360 and $250 cheaper than the preferred PS3.  Add to it the fact Wii games retail at $49 vs $59 for 360/PS3 games and you get an obvious price savings on the Wii. 

What DQ asks is if the Wii came out at $399 with $59 games would it have taken off and become the sensation it has become?  Would it have competed against the 360 as well in the US and Europe if they were priced the same at the beginning of the console race?  I tend to think if both consoles came out at $399 the Wii would have failed in the US.  The clear flaw would be the quality of the graphics and it's price geared towards the hard core instead of the casual.

If you flip it around and launched the 360 at $249 with $49 games I think the Wii would still have the great success it sees today.  I think it would probably be a much closer contest in the US  but I think you'd have seen the casual audience still flock to the Wii and the hardcore flock to the 360.  I'd expect you would see a lot more people willing to have two consoles in their household if the 360 was priced better at launch.  It's hard to say how many people stayed away from the 360 because of it's hardware issues.  The hardcore fan can deal with a broken 360 but a casual fan will probably not accept this and more away from the 360.

Next generation I wonder if console makers will learn from the mistakes of this generation.  Will anyone not thoroughly test their console's hardware just to make a holiday launch date?  Will anyone launch a game console with no internal storage for full game downloads?  I wonder if console makers will price themselves out of the market like Sony has?  I expect we'll start to learn these answers some time next year.

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