Nintendo Kicks Sony When Its Down

As children, we are taught that it’s not fair to kick someone when they are down because they won’t have a fair chance to fight back.   Businesses, such as Nintendo,  though, prefer to pounce on their competitors such as Sony Corp. when they are at their most vulnerable.

The timing is hardly coincidental that Nintendo decided to announce that it had lowered prices for its Wii gaming console by $50 to $150 along with a cut in the prices of several games so soon after the massive PlayStation data breach.   Nintendo is betting that consumers’ confidence in Sony was probably shaken after hackers compromised the data of 77 million users, and they probably would be right.   Trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and really difficult to win back.

Sony, though, has little choice but to try given that it earns about $500 million annual revenue from the service that was compromised.   Look for the Japanese company to announce massive deals for consumers on the PlayStation 3, which had been steadily gaining market share after a slow start.   Microsoft Corp. may do the same with its Xbox game console and Kinect add-on.  During the most recent quarter, the software giant sold 2.7 million Xboxes and 2.4 million Kinects.

–Jonathan Berr