Yes I know the Gamecube took a small hit back in the days but I don't believe it was anywhere to this extent?

18 months on and according to Nintendo, WiiU is still making a loss. Which I'm guessing rules out any impactful price cut they could have had this year.

They went back to red ocean strategy ...

After the Wii and DS era they had money to burn. And they're burning it and burning it and burning it.

Nintendo losing money, Sony losing money...

.... it seems that Microsoft is the only winner here.

The Wii U isn't expensive because of it's hardware performance.

It's expensive because Nintendo became obsessed with weird, niche-y hardware ideals like a system having to be as small as possible so it would be approved by Japanese moms. And having to have low electrical draw because uh ... well because of efficiency sake or something

That's why it requires a heavily customized chip. That and they thought throwing a 6 inch touch panel (and because it's Nintendo they have to use a resistive touch panel that no one else uses, everyone else is on capacitive).

All these weird, custom demands that Nintendo makes on their hardware means the hardware is not cheap to produce, it's heavily customized and Nintendo has to pay for that. Nintendo can't use an AMD GPU design from a perfectly good existing chip ... they have to have a completely custom chip designed from scratch to their needs, which again is expensive (honestly Yamauchi would not allow this). Much like the 3D screen on the 3DS is expensive.

Both MS and Nintendo have the same problem in that they also bet the farm on expensive controller gimmicks that have back fired in terms of sales appeal and are now weighing their respective console's down by keeping the price high. 

They wanted to make a console for U. Bad move.

There was none.

not sure but thats clearly the Wii U's biggest problem right now, being sold at a loss. Even though sales for it are very poor it wouldnt really be that big a deal if it was sold at a profit.

its a shame always respected nintendo for making sure they profit per console sold,didn't reggie say profit was console and 1 game sold a while back

Nintendo was prepared to sell the Gamecube at a loss when it first launched at $199 but the price war with Sony cut the price down to $149 six months in and I don't think they ever made a profit on the actual console hardware after that.