Nvidia Cuts Pricing of Shield Game Console Ahead of Release

From X-bit Labs: Nvidia Corp. on Thursday reduced pricing of its upcoming Shield game console by $50 ahead of commercial roll-out later this month. The new price is expected to attract more attention to the device from gamers, but it will still face fierce competition from dedicated consoles with specially-developed content and available at lower price-points.

Starting today, gamers can pre-order Nvidia Shield game consoles at $299, down $50 from the price Nvidia announced in mid-May, exactly a month ago. The company did not disclose reasons for a price-slash, but usually products in high demand do not get any cheaper. Interested customers may pre-order Shield game system from Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers as well as on shield.nvidia.com. Nvidia will start shipping and selling Shield products on June 27, 2013.

While $299 is clearly a more competitive price-point than $349, it still does not seem to be competitive enough when compared to Sony PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. The former is available now at $249, whereas the other starts from $160 price-point online. Both platforms feature rich portfolio of high-quality games designed for them and meant to run on them. By contrast, Nvidia Shield will rely on content designed for low-cost Google Android-based gadgets.

As a pure Android device, Nvidia Shield gives access to any game on Google Play. And as a wireless receiver and controller, it can stream select number of supported games from Steam from a PC powered by Nvidia GeForce GTX GPUs, accessing titles on its Steam game library from anywhere in the home. Nvidia Shield is based on Nvidia Tegra 4 system-on-chip (four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, Nvidia GeForce graphics adapter with 72 stream processors), is equipped with a 5” capacitive touch-screen with 1280*720 resolution (294ppi) and features 802.11n Wi-Fi technology with 2*2 MIMO antennas to stream PC games. Project Shield's ergonomic controller was built for the gamer who wants ultimate control and precision. The portable device also has integrated high-quality speakers. Nvidia Shield runs Google Android (4.0) Jelly Bean OS.

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