Nintendo caused a major splash in the video game world when it announced to slash the price of the 3DS in Japan, the US and elsewhere by 30-40% (depending on the country) – just a few months after the system went on sale.
And now we have the first hardware sales numbers from Japan coming in, and it looks like casual gaming on social networks, the rise of freemium and all those free/inexpensive smartphone apps made consumers more price sensitive in recent years.
According to video game magazine publishing house Enterbrain, Nintendo managed to sell a whopping 215,000 units of the 3DS between August 8 and 14. The price drop (from 25,000 Yen to 15,000 yen) went into full effect on August 11 (but quite a few stores in Japan actually reduced the price a few days earlier).
By way of comparison: Nintendo in Japan shipped over 350,000 units in the week after launch (and roughly 200,000 in the week after that), meaning the price drop triggered some kind of second beginning in this country for the system (in May, for example, only 109,000 3DS were sold domestically).
In total, 1.5 million 3DS systems have been sold in Japan so far.
Via Famitsu [JP]