Arch rival Sony, although enjoying a recent resurgence in PlayStation 2 sales thanks to Square Co Ltd's hit Final Fantasy X game, is not standing by quietly.
Sony cut the price of its console, which comes with a DVD player, to ?35,000 (US$290) from ?39,800 in Japan in June.
Some analysts anticipate an additional cut of ?5,000 ahead of the key end-year shopping season, even perhaps a day before the GameCube launch, as it did for the Nintendo64 debut.
A spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony's game unit, said it had no such plan, but he said the firm was always reviewing price strategy to fit market conditions.
A summer campaign in which Sony joined hands with McDonald's Co (Japan) Ltd to promote its game characters was also part of a pre-emptive strike, Daiwa's Maeda said.
Japanese software makers also hold high hopes for GameCube, seeing it as a way to fend off an invasion of mobile phones, which compete for disposable income.
According to the Computer Entertainment Software Association (CESA), Japanese consumer game software sales have fallen from a peak of ?389 billion in 1997 to ?293 billion in 2000.
RSS