Nintendo has this morning confirmed that as anticipated, the Nintendo Wii console will have it’s price cut from £179 (R1,957) to £129 (R1,410), with the new price being implemented on 20 May in Europe.<\/p>\n
We have contacted local Nintendo distributor Core, but they are currently unable to confirm whether or not we will be getting a price cut in SA. Logic dictates that we will, as was the case the last time the Wii received an international price cut.<\/p>\n
In October 2009 Core reduced the price of the Wii by R1,000, from R3,499 to R2,499. The console has not budged from this price point since then.<\/p>\n
Local pricing is directly affected by European pricing, so if our price reductions is equivalent to the UK’s, we should see a reduction of around 28%, or R700. So the local Wii price should fall to about R1,800.<\/p>\n
The price cut comes following confirmation from Nintendo that the company plans to reveal a follow up to the Wii at this year’s E3 conference which takes place in June. The console is being called Project Café, but for sanity’s sake we will refer to it as the Wii 2. Rumour has it that the Wii 2 will feature a custom tri-core IBM PowerPC CPU, an ATI R700 class GPU (think HD 4870 performance), and at least 512Mb of RAM.<\/p>\n
It will also supposedly feature a built-in six inch touch screen controller. The hardware puts the Wii 2 roughly on par with the Xbox 360.<\/p>\n
Would a sub-R2000 price tag tempt you into buying a Wii?<\/p>\n