GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo no longer simply wants price drops this year for the Wii and PS3, he expects them to happen, or else Sony and Nintendo aren’t going to be hitting their forecasted sales numbers this year.
Dan DeMatteo has been mentioning PS3 and Wii price drops for some time now, but the tone of his predictions changed dramatically during a recent conference call to investors. Now instead of seeing price cuts as something he wants to happen, he sees them as something that he expects to happen, and, moreover, that needs to happen.
His company, it seems, is so sure of price cuts happening that they’re factoring them into their own financial outlook for the year. DeMatteo forecast 33.5 million hardware unit sales for 2009, and “that assumes that there will be price cuts on the PS3 and potentially one on the Wii…there are some price cuts built into that assumption, but not until the third quarter.”
DeMatteo explained that the state of the world economy will force Sony and Nintendo to drop their prices. “The hardware price points, given this economic environment are potentially too high, and if the platform holders are going to make the numbers that they forecasted for the year, those prices would have to change,” he said.
He also pointed out that prices have stayed up longer in this cycle than any other generation before, and that in a bad economy, that doesn’t seem to make much sense.
“Put all those things together, I think that there will have to be price cuts in order to get the hardware moving to where it needs to be,” DeMatteo concluded.
It’s his butt on the line too, after all.
[Via GI.biz]
Published: May 22, 2009 11:50 pm