Iwata talks WiiU price!

[HappySqurriel]

I think there are a lot of people who have bought into a lot of hype and misinformation when it comes to the HD consoles; and they’re unwilling or unable to acknowledge the current market reality.

Until Microsoft entered the market with the XBox few consoles were sold at a significant loss for an extended period of time. Certainly, the initial run of PS2 systems probably did live up to the hype and cost Sony $100 more to produce than they sold for, but from the time it launched in Japan to its launch in the United States 8 months later many of the components had already seen significant price reductions.

What this means is that for over 20 years companies have been able to take inexpensive and energy efficient hardware, package it into a small system, sell it for an affordable price, and have it initially perform at a similar level to what people expect from a gaming PC at the time. I see very little reason why Nintendo should not be able to do something very similar to this today and, being that the XBox 360 will have been on the market for 7 years when this system launches, why this system wouldn’t be dramatically more powerful than the HD consoles.

People keep saying that the controller will be expensive but I believe they’re over-estimating the cost associated with that quite a bit. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it hundreds of times between now and the price being announced but today you can buy a touch screen LCD colour ebook reader for under $100 which should be more expensive to manufacture than this controller; and over the next 12 to 18 months many of the components will (probably) see price reductions to the extent that similar ebook readers may sell for as little as $50 to $75.

With all that said, I think the only thing I would be willing to guarantee about the price of the Wii U is that it will be affordable; unfortunately that is not a term which is particularly specific. Inflation and exchange rates have changed a lot over the last 10 years, and the conditions that allowed Nintendo to sell the Gamecube for $200 no longer exist.