350$ - 400$

Close in power to the ps4 or xbos720, like the ps2 was to GC.

If you take how the Wii is stronger than two GCs taped together, remember that joke, figure the Wii 2 will be as strong as two and a half Wiis taped together. That would make the Wii 2 about as powerful as the 360 and fit in power model that Nintendo follows which seems to be increase their consoles power by 2 - 3 times every generation.

Not at all actually. There is only so much an company can afford to sacrific for us gamers in terms of money. The dollar will effect the price. The 3DS is only $250 because it isn't that much stronger than the DS and since the screens are small adding 3D wasn't to costly. The cost of the tech difference between the DS and 3DS isn't vastly different and the basic features of the DS is featured in the 3DS and have had their costs lowered dramatically.

For consoles its different as each generation you have pretty decent leaps in power over the last generation. That isn't cheap to sell when the value of the dollar by 2013 will be half or less of its worth now.

Just on this point ...

Prices on most products in most markets are based on what people have demonstrated a willingness to pay, not based on what exchange rates are. This is one of the reasons why Europeans constantly complain about being "Screwed" on the price of many goods like most videogame consoles. The exception to this tends to be in markets where the barriers to consumers buying products from another country are limited, and (therefore) prices end up being much closer when you compare exchange rates; the best example of this is (probably) Canada, where cross border shopping and grey market suppliers tend to undemine a company's ability to set their prices dramatically differently in Canada vs. the USA.

If Nintendo is not losing a significant amonut of money on their console due to manufacturing costs they will have some flexability to cut into profits (or take small losses) to ensure that their system sells for the price they want it to in every region regardless of what the exchange rates are.

Vote goes to $300 due to the slowly rising cost of gaming consoles. I'm not expecting a revolutionary console, more like a huge evolution like the translation from the NES to SNES with a considerable jump in quality.

However, I highly doubt that the plummeting US dollar values is going to have nearly as much effect as people think. Nintendo is selling the console in Japan for about 25000 yens (Translating to $300 in US Dollars). We're getting it for $250. I don't think game console costs is necessarily going to be affected by the declining value in US dollars, they have to take into account euro's and yen's as well.

Huh?

The 3DS costs 25000 Yen when it's out, and that translates to around 300 US$. (right now it's 304.73 $)

$349.99

I see a powerful machine with "something new", like 3DS. Also, they need to justify the price for their handheld with the price of their homeconsole. $249 for a portable and $299 for a homeconsole? I don't think so.

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How do you figure that? The jump from DS to 3DS seems to be greater than the jump from N64 to Gamecube.

That only a pretty recent thing; in the old days, up to the PlayStation, the consoles' CPU/GPU power was generally a generation behind what a current PC was capable of.  It was only with the last two generations that consoles tried to catch up to PCs in terms of power, so the relative jumps in power were much greater than in previous generations.  Now that consoles have caught up to PCs, I imagine the next jump won't be as drastic.  What might happen is that the generations get longer, so that the leaps in technology will be more clear, but it won't affect the price as the new consoles would be as "stat of the art" at the time of their release, as the previous generation's consoles.