Gamestop offers Wii bundle...for $699???

[Kugyou]

Things like this just irk me. What it seems to boil down to is a few things at once:

• Artificial "PRP attach" numbers - by forcing a consumer to buy a replacement plan, the business justifies the continued pressured sale of such. I'm strongly inclined to believe that the PRP attach numbers without coercion might at least make the company not so quick to have their employees pressure and, on occasion, lie to the consumer.
  
• Artificial regular "attach" numbers - this is the big market-getter in the eyes of the mainstream games media. Raw console sales numbers are one thing, but when you show that 80% of consumers also purchased four games, that makes the console look all the sweeter to an uninformed buyer. The mindset then becomes "Wow! There must have been a bunch of awesome launch titles!".
  
• Laziness. Pure, sheer, "we don't want to have to process hundreds of separate pre-orders and fulfill them individually" laziness.
  

In short, it seems like a way to inflate numbers and move units that might not otherwise move. One need only look at the attach rates at launch for the GameCube (or worse yet, the Dreamcast) to realize that a launch-title-poor market can effectively kill a console, or drive it to a niche market.

And unfortunately, with the fact that the perceived attach rate benefits not only the retailers but the console's creators, it's hard to distance Nintendo from this fracas without a statement from Nintendo themselves.

I.
Hate.
Launch Marketing.

Like Weird Al hates sauerkraut.

[FawkesFyre]

I think I learned my lesson a long time ago when I bought a Gamecube as part of a bundle pack from them...its simply a waste of money. I didn't intend to buy a Wii anyhow but I'm certainly not going to fall into the trap of spending almost $700 for a $250 system + a $50 game.