Nintendo Says It Will Announce Wii Release Date in September

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Nintendo Co., the world's biggest maker of handheld video-game players, said it will announce the price and release date of its Wii video-game console in September.

The company, which plans a fourth-quarter release for Wii, has said the console will be cheaper than game players by Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. Nintendo may begin selling the device, which features a motion-sensing controller, as early as late September, according to CNNMoney.com. Sony sells its PlayStation 3 in November, while Microsoft started Xbox 360 sales last year.

``There's no change in our plan to release the console in the last quarter of this year,'' Yasuhiro Minagawa, a spokesman for the Kyoto-based company, said in a telephone interview today. ``We are planning an announcement in September and it may be causing some confusion.''

Nintendo, which dominates the handheld game player market, is looking to grab share for home consoles by attracting consumers to its Wii unit, which features a controller that lets users maneuver games by waving it in the air. Sony's PlayStation 3 will feature games with high-definition graphics, as does Microsoft's Xbox 360.

The Wii console, which Nintendo said won't cost more than $250, compares with a $300 starting price for the Xbox 360 and an expected tag of at least $500 for Sony's PlayStation 3.

`Dark Horse'

Nintendo may make its Wii console available in October, with late September ``a dark horse candidate,'' CNNMoney.com said, citing industry people including analyst P.J. McNealy.

The company last month said it expects to ship 6 million Wii consoles by March 2007, and about 17 million software games for the device.

``Our position remains that the Wii could retail as low as $199 instead of $249, and October is a reasonable timeframe,'' McNealy, a San Francisco-based analyst at American Technology Research, wrote in a July 21 report.

Shares of Nintendo rose 4.9 percent to 20,600 yen as of 2:23 p.m. on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The stock has gained 35 percent in the past six months, while the Nikkei 225 Stock Average has dropped 7 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Pavel Alpeyev in Tokyo at palpeyev@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Teo Chian Wei at cwteo@bloomberg.net