Over 30% Price Drop for Nintendo 3DS, 20 Free Virtual Console Games for Early Adopters

This was originally posted on agamingsite.com

It is no news that 3DS hasn’t quite taken off as well as Nintendo would’ve liked. After much hype at last year’s E3, Nintendo decided that the demand would be high enough for them to be able to sell 3DS for some hefty profit and set the price much higher than they had originally planned. The 250$/€ price point, however, didn’t warm the hearts of gamers, so 3DS sales have been somewhat slow. As a surprising but not totally unexpected announcement, Nintendo has announced a price drop for Nintendo 3DS, which will happen on August 13, 2011.

As Nintendo has entered the latter half of 2011 and as the release dates of their heavy hitters like Super Mario 3D Land (November 2011) and Mario Kart 7 (December 2011) are approaching fast, they’ve decided that they need to boost 3DS sales, hence the 30% price drop. From August 13 forward, 3DS will be available for 169$ in the US, 169€ in Europe, 130£ in the UK, 250 AUD in Australia and 15,000 yen in Japan. Before early adopters get on the fence with pitchforks and whatnot for paying a lot more for their 3DSs, Nintendo has announced that for early adopters or “Ambassadors”, as Nintendo calls them, they will offer 20 Virtual Console games for free.

By the end of 2011, early adopters will have access to 10 free NES games and 10 free Game Boy Advance games. These include classics like Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi’s Island, Mario Kart Advance and Metroid Fusion. The NES games will be, at first, some kind of early versions that, for example, don’t include digital manuals and they lack any kind of possibility for multiplayer, even if the original game had support for it. Later on, the NES Classics will be made available for all 3DS users with finalized emulation & features for the games. As an interesting and somewhat worrying twist for later adopters, Nintendo says the GBA games will be made available ONLY for early adopters and that they currently have absolutely no plans to make GBA games available through their Virtual Console service in the future. Hopefully that is only about their current plans, as GBA games would surely be appreciated by many 3DS owners.

To get access to these, people will need to have logged in to Nintendo’s eShop service with their 3DS at least once before August 11, 2011. This happens simply by getting your 3DS online through a wifi connection, downloading the update that makes the eShop available in the Home Menu (if you haven’t already) and booting the eShop up once. Once you’ve connected to the eShop once, you should be able to get these 20 free games once they are made available.

This news of a big price drop will certainly make the upcoming months very interesting. Will Vita be able to compete with 3DS with an 80 dollar/euro difference in price? Or will it be doomed to be another PSP that gets great support, but can’t quite stand against Nintendo’s handheld juggernaut and it will have to settle for second place again.

Expect more details to be announced in the future, as this clearly quickly put together Ambassador program is still in its early stages.

www.agamingsite.com

Comments

[Abrown516]

I read somewhere that Wal-Mart was going to drop the price earlier, by the 9th. So if this is true, people who buy a 3DS before the 11th at Wal-Mart, you'll be taking a huge advantage from this price drop. I'm going to be watching this and hopefully persuade the rents to agree with me :P