Official: WII Joins PS3, Xbox 360 in Price Drop Wars

As Microsoft and Sony continue to prepare their new motion control functions for their current generation systems, Nintendo, the company that made motion control ubiquitous to living rooms across the world, has announced the first price drop of the Wii.

Launched in November, 2006, the price drop for the Nintendo Wiihasn't come sooner because of low availability and high demand, consistent for over two years. As of Sunday, Sept 27 2009 however, the system will lower its price from $249 to what some analysts call the "magic price point" of $199.

This news is hot on the heels of price drops from Nintendo's two competitors in the home console market. Sony kicked off the lowering prices in August at Gamescom in Germany when they announced the PlayStation 3 Slim at the lower price of $299. The new release featured a larger hard drive and slimmer form factor at a lower price point, the ideal situation for new gamers who had been holding out.

Just a couple weeks later, Microsoft announced their "Elite" model Xbox 360 would also drop in price to $299. This brought a system with the same hard drive capacity as the PS3Slim to the same price, though the Xbox 360 Elite  is still sans built-in wifi (and of course, no Blu-ray player either).

The Wii price drop comes with no feature/pack-in changes, but analysts predict it will help the system maintain its healthy lead over the 360 and PS3. Worldwide, according to VGChartz.com, the Wii has sold approximately 53.27 million units, or 48.6% of the current generation's installed user base. This grossly overshadows the 31.96 million Xbox 360s (which premiered a year earlier in November, 2005) and 24.3 million PS3s (which began sales in November, 2006) sold so far.