At the end of March, when the Nintendo 3DS launched, the official price for the device was $349.95 and the cheapest standalone price was $288. Barely four months later, Nintendo has hacked the price rather dramatically, reducing the list price to $249.95.
Gaming isn’t Lifehacker’s core focus, but we’re mentioning this because it demonstrates yet again how being an early adopter with technology can end up being expensive. We’ve seen particularly extreme examples with Android tablets, which have routinely fallen to half or a third of their release price in the same sort of time frames. The 3DS drop isn’t quite as pronounced, but if I was a kid who had saved their pocket money to buy, I might feel disappointed. Yes, I’d have four months of gaming and some playground kudos, but $100 is still a lot of money. Nintendo is offering existing owners a bunch of game downloads as partial compensation (10 each from its retro NES and Gameboy/Gameboy Advance catalogues), but that’s only really effective compensation if those are games you wanted.
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