thing is wiiU's stats would be pretty good if not for the gamepad eating/reserving a lot of its raw performance. the question to ask "is the gamepad the next wiimote or next 3D". one feature was valued by the market the other not so much. without the gamepad's required specs (and cost lowering investment in other parts) the wiiU would be quite a significant upgrade fidelity wise.

i don't think a $400 console would have killed them with "core" players but in this down economy especially the cheaper the better.

i dunno, nintendo was in a tough position this gen. wiiU is being compared to both the wii and the ps360. if wiiU didn't have a new "gimmick" people would have complained. if wiiU didn't match ps360's visuals and online people would have complained. having both ... well that would be expensive. what would the 360 cost if kinect launched day 1? $600?

I don't think move from 360 to WiiU is that much different - actually, I think their architectures have much more in common than 360 and PS3. This is why, in my opinion, by just having somewhat more powerfull CPU and 128bit bus, WiiU would be more than capable of doing what I wrote earlier - easy ports with slightly higher settings/assets, with no significant time/cash spend on fine tuning. It would raise production cost slightly, but to be honest, I don't think they would need to increase price at all - that Reggie's statement to me sounds like lot of bollocks, I think they are profitable, at least on Deluxe version, from the start.

I don't think Nintendo is in a tough position at all.  I think your sensationalizing this a bit.  Every new console is compared to it's previous gen hardware and competitor's hardware.  This happened with the PS3 as well, which was outsold by the PS2 for like a year and looked bad compared to the 360 during that year.  You're making the Wii U situation out to be like it's unique and unprecedented and that's just not true.  It's only been out not even a week yet... C'mon!

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let me rephrase a bit.  nintendo probably came up with some sort of target price: $350.  with that buget in mind they had to make decisions about where to put that money.  into cpu?  into ram?  into the gamepad?  into some other sort of control input?

sony can probably get a way with releasing a purely game machine: just a cheap standard style controller.   nintendo probably couldn't.  they would be critized far more than MSony if they had a console without some sort of gimmick.  ..thus making the decisions about design (that have already been made) all the harder.

wiiU isn't a "leap" over ps360 in raw power.  but could they even afford to do that?  both a leap and a gamepad would have been a very expensive console.

this has nothing to do with it only being out a week.  sales performance isn't what i was trying to talk about.

Its more a question of graphics, AI and physics realised in actual games that people want to play as opposed to simply measuring "power" or specs.

Why would Sony get away with a standard controller but Nintendo wouldn't?  I don't know what you're trying to say here.  And you're saying Nintendo needs a gimmick or they'll be criticized?  That's very ironic.

I don't think it's a question of affordability, it's more a in-house philosophy of why even do it.

Good points, and I keep asking the same question. What do these graphic whorse expect the PS4/720 to cost? Plus they are said to have Move and Kinect built in (new upgraded versions I might add). Plus they want to take not that much of a loss? 2014 will be interesting, as I don't think either console will make 2013, but that's good for Nintendo.

That is pretty good,  they should bring some of their Iphone/ipad games over to consoles.  Would totally pay 10-15 bucks/euro/pizza's for them. 

Unreal no, however EPIC was desperate t get it working on consoles and was begging hardware manufactures to bend over to their spec requirements lol.

Saying that, the engine is scalable, so it could run on WiiU but not will full features.

This is as true as you can get.

We seen it time and time again.