whoops, my mistake.

Giving the Wii U a price cut will only help it in the short run. Nintendo cares more about the long run

The problem for both Wii U and XO is that after their price drops they STILL are too expensive. XO costs the same as PS4, but it's common knowledge that it's an inferior console. Why get less for the same money? Wii U is only $100 cheaper, but is closer to PS360 than PS4One in terms of performance. People look at this and can't see the value for the asking price. It's not just about cutting the price for the sake of it, it's about setting it on the proper level.

When I said that a Nintendo console shouldn't cost more than $250 I meant while they are still following their "blue ocean" strategy, ignoring the core mainstream. Wii U is just a Nintendo-Box, it's not really competing with PS4One. It's a console people would buy to get their Mario/Zelda/MK/Smash fix. That's all, cause at this point it's not even the go-to party console anymore. If that's what they offer, they can't set the price this high, their console has to be cheap, cause it only satisfies a very specific need. If they were to abandon this strategy and release a regular console on par with competition that would get all 3rd party support at the same quality - they could obviously charge a regular price.

The problem with Wii U is that it's impossible for Nintendo to improve the value to truely compete with PS4One, cause 3rd parties just won't care about it and, quite frankly, the gamers wouldn't care about any multiplats, as they'd be heavily gimped due to console limitations. Nintendo 1st party is great, but it's not better than 3rd parties +Sony/MS 1st party. This is why, I believe, they need to show a pricetag that makes their product a no-brainer. Its only chance to get any real traction is to become "the second console" that everyone who owns a PS4 or XO needs to have. But a secondary console can't cost as much as the primary one.

So to sum up my argument - I'm all for Nintendo improving the value of the product, it's essential, but it is absolutely impossible for Wii U to have value similar to PS4One. Thus, as long as the price remains in the same ballpark as the price of PS4One, it won't be worth the value. Nintendo can't take on the whole world with a clearly inferior product and charge you almost the same price.

To me the price is the most important factor keeping me from getting a Wii U. I'm thinking really hard about that MK8 bundle (it's 300 Euro here), but after comparing what I got from my Wii and my PS3, I'm really unwilling to pay this much.

This is absolutely not true. The pricecut helped Vita a lot... in Japan. Because there the cut was accompanied by a big flood of games (at least game per week for over 2 months) AND a media campaign. Even though the games released in the West are very good and the library is very solid, the media was totally neglected and people still think it has no games. The decision to stop making games in the West was a nail in the coffin here. Still, it all worked out quite well in Japan where Vita is healthy and competing with 3DS.

It seems evident that Nintendo's strategy now is to simply minimize losses/damages from the Wii U, so they're not willing to take a big loss on the console if it's only going to sell 15-20 million machines either way.

So I guess the answer to the question is they'll drop the price when ever it's feasible to drop it without incurring large losses.

Which is complicated by the fact that they're not selling very many of them, so mass production costs probably remain high. If they were making a lot, they could drop the price probably easier because the price of components would come down faster if they were ordering tons of them.

Anyhow, I think they *might* be able to cut this holiday to $249.99, but more realistically I think you're probably looking at spring 2015.

It has been selling much better lately. Why does it need a price drop? Just a heads up on comparing the size of the hard drives though. The Wii U uses a SSD HD, the X1 and PS4 use traditional HD's. The SSD HD give much, much, much faster read and write speeds for the OS and are much more reliable but they are expensive, much more expensive than traditional HD's for similar amounts of storage space. I'm not sure where you are purchasing your external HD's, but I got a 2TB for $105 Canadian. The Wii U already had a price cut, I doubt there will be another at least until late 2015-2016.

$50 price drop by Spring or Summer 2015.

Weird since a $30 dollar drop would put it to $269.99. 

I honestly think the "software is everything" mantra is actually kind of false these days.

Every system has or will eventually have more good games than any reasonable person (ie: a person with any kind of life) has time to play.

So that really isn't the sway point it once was. There aren't systems like the 3DO, Jaguar, 32X, Sega Master System, etc. anymore. If the library is everything then Wii U should be outselling the PS4 easily as the PS4's library right now is nothing to write home about. 

You have to have a lot of the other details right. And the NES did beat the Sega Master System, but the NES didn't beat the Genesis ... because Nintendo brought out the Super NES to take on the Genesis. Being a generation behind the existing machines is something that isn't a winnable formula unless you have some kind of disruptive gimmick like the Wiimote to change things up.

Which the Wii U doesn't have (tablet pad is a huge failure in this respect).