This is wrong, Microsoft did not alright at this price, it was only when it hit the 200$ pricetag that the 360 started to have success.

Nintendo has never sold a console that much and seriously, it would hurt them a lot if the pricetag of the Wii U was superior to the Wii when it was released.

If the Wii U is worth 400 $ of hardware, it is a massive failure from Nintendo, a massive mistake. But I doubt they are that stupid. They know price matters more than technology. Wii showed it. 3DS showed it again.

I would be very surprised if they released the Wii U at more than 300$ after experiencing the 3DS slower than expected start before the pricecut.

The PS360 crowd will, very soon, be offered a choice between the WiiU, and the PS4 or 720. When this comes, the WiiU will have had about a year of getting games and word of mouth in its favour. The WiiU is in a good position.

they will make 0.01p profit each console...

but the games price will be sliighty higher then usual £1 each and tehy will make a bit of a profit there.

For those suggesting a 250-300$ price tag, you must be high no offence.

Iwata said WiiU will be expensive and that was before adding the extra processing power and Ram needed for a second controller as well as beefing the consoles power. 200-300$ is not a reasonable price for a video game console, its not logical and can't be done without cutting serious corners or taking a massive loss.

You have to realize the reason Wii could sell that cheap was because other then the controller their was very and I mean very little technology that was expensive to manufacture. Nintendo could make the system for pennies and was able to sell it at a massive profit.

The WiiU is not the same, firstly Nintendo realizes if they want to compete for their core software addicted audience then they need to have a graphically competitive platform. Meaning even with WiiU being the least powerful next generation they need to ensure it can play multiplat games. If they cut corners power wise they still face many costs.

The controller is huge, people say not 100$ well it might not be but they need more factories and more resources. Its not just the raw materials that add to the cost its the shipping and assembeling. The controller is not cheap and even if Nintendo cuts as many corners as possible to produce the cheapest possible tablet controller it will still be 60+ dollars at least.

And those that say Nintendo has never sold hardware at a loss. I thought so too but decided to look into it, this info is contested. No Nintendo didn't admit to launching GameCube or N64 at a loss but several sites report they did. Now if we don't listen to those reports and only follow Nintendo's word themselves we know that GameCube was sold at a loss mid generation and towards the end it was selling at a heavier loss.

I said 300-400$ price tag and at a loss. That sounds like the most logical considering what Iwata said and what we know about the hardware. 349.99$ sounds like a likely price to me at a loss of between 50-100$ or at 400$ at a much smaller loss. Also I am sure Nintendo has spies at MS and Sony so they will likely have an idea of how much their competitor will launch at.

Nintendo will launch WiiU as the least expensive console next generation. But launching at 279.99$ or less would not only mean taking a loss but it would mean cutting corners. Nintendo needs to release a high quality console or they will get crushed mid generation!

Technology advances rapidly, after all. Wii U can take advantage of much smaller die sizes as well as other advancements in tech since the beginning of the generation, so it's likely less for them to get something beefy under the hood without having to climb too rapidly, and still be comfortably ahead of PS360, and not so far behind the Sony Microsoft successor consoles that they'll be run out of the loop

i don't even know what i'm still arguing as i really don't care but...

$55 for the record.

Wiimote with motion plus is already $40, with an extra $20 for the nunchuck.  with no doubt a healthy profit margin but from what i've seen your still missing:

A mic

A speaker

A 6.2" high resolution touchscreen

An internal recharable battery

and frankly there has just got to be somesort of a motherboard on this bugger.  To stream a the video to the controller the information has just got to be encrypted in some way to minimize the data transfer size and then unencrypted the the wiiU tablet. 

and i have a background in polymer processing and i promise you, the casing is deceivingly expensive.  ..or more directly, there is a roughly exponential cost vs. size curve and as this controller is pretty sizable compared to the wiimote or dualshock. 

anyhoo, i don't know what it will cost but it will obviously cost a lot more than the controllers we're accustom to.

The controllers are not going to cost a lot. The hardware inside is  less than a DS and they can sell those at a profit for $99

Nitnendo could probably sell them for $60 - $70 with profit.

A mic , speaker, 6.2" high resolution touchscreen, internal recharable battery. Nothing there seems like some new expensive technology that would be expensive to manufacture. Those are all mature tech.

The tablet itself has very little in terms of hardware, the console does all the heavy lifting, streams to the tablet and the it just accepts the feed and spits back control instructions. Plus the GPU uses eyefinity technology for streaming.

Why is it a failure? IMHO it wouldnt be that bad, so a couple of cheap people have to wait. They will wait. If the tech is good, they are ensuring they dont get left out of the cold just like the Wii did when it came to getting good games or any games at all. 400 might be a bit much. But i see it going from 300-350

Ummm...Nintendo will opt to lose money if they think the present value of the future returns gained by doing so outweigh the present value of the future returns if they would not do so. Nintendo generally doesn't like to sell things for less than it costs to make them. I would say that no, Nintendo will not sell the Wii U at a loss to start, or probably ever.

It's pretty much a given now that they've had this bad experience with the 3DS launch.

In terms of raw processing power I guess the console will be somewhat faster than PS3 and Xbox360 but not that much.

And I can't believe some people are actually estimating the controller to be $100 in production cost... cut that in half and you're good to go. There are real tablets being produced for 100 bucks, this one's got a low res screen (640x480), no multitouch, no heavy internals and no flash storage.

Production costs for most products are way lower than you'd think. It's taxes, retailer margins and advertisement that also add a lot of cost. Many European countries got like 20% taxes on products. So if you buy console X for €300 that's more than €50 of taxes. Look at the latest PSP model for instance which retails for €99.99. There's up to €20 taxes on it, shipping costs, advertisement, retailer margin, etc. and they still make a profit on each unit sold.

Basically, the console without the tablet looks like it could be sold for $250-300 while breaking even. It depends on the amount of flash storage they put in and the final specs but that's roughly what we're looking at I think. Then add $50 for the tablet and I think they'll sell it for $299. That's assuming rumors of a quad core CPU and huge amounts of RAM are false, of course. Looking at the size of the console (it's way smaller than current HD consoles) I doubt it will be much more capable than a PS3 or Xbox360, though.

Will they turn a profit in the beginning? I don't think so. But I doubt we're looking at anything above $299 at launch... and I still think they should've made the tablet optional.