Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian believes that Wii sales remain healthy in the US for now, despite a recent slowdown in Japan.

“With recent data from Japan indicating a slowdown in Wii hardware, our checks in the U.S. still indicate fairly steady sell-through, albeit within the context of some seasonal sluggishness overall in hardware,” he said in a March NPD preview note.

“We note that the Wii is now widely available at retail (90% in stock position), attributable to production increases put in place last summer as well as a more normalized mid-cycle selling pattern.”

Sebastian also believes that Sony needs to lower the price of the PS3 ahead of the summer in order to maintain market share, although he said such a move is no certainty.

“We do not believe a PS3 price cut announcement is assured this spring, but in our view Sony will need to lower the price ahead of the holidays to avoid a further step down in market share.”

Roughly in line with earlier estimates from Wedbush Morgan and EEDAR analysts, Sebastian said he expects March video game software sales “were flat to down slightly”.

“We expect overall hardware sales to improve in April data, driven by the recent PS2 price cut and launch of Nintendo’s DSi,” he added.