Value is something in the mind of a human-being. The word you are looking for is, equillibrium price. 

Here is how mainstream economists define economic value. 

http://www.ecosystemvaluation.org/1-01.htm

Thus, economic value is measured by the most someone is willing to give up in other goods and services in order to obtain a good, service, or state of the world.  In a market economy, dollars (or some other currency) are a universally accepted measure of economic value, because the number of dollars that a person is willing to pay for something tells how much of all other goods and services they are willing to give up to get that item. This is often referred to as “willingness to pay.” 

It is often incorrectly assumed that a good’s market price measures its economic value.  However, the market price only tells us the minimum amount that people who buy the good are willing to pay for it.  When people purchase a marketed good, they compare the amount they would be willing to pay for that good with its market price.  They will only purchase the good if their willingness to pay is equal to or greater than the price.  Many people are actually willing to pay more than the market price for a good, and thus their values exceed the market price.

@Bolded - trust me, I'm an expert
And I know how pricing works. The reason why a $50 cut isn't enough in my opinion is that we know beyond any doubt that there is currently next to no demand for the Wii U. It's not a bad product, it has some great games, but people don't care about it, it's not competitive in today's market (let's not get into the reasons for it in this thread). The bottom line is, it can't compete with a $399 Xbone and PS4, let alone with Xbone dropping to $349. MS is aggressive, Sony is expected to follow suit some time later, Nintendo has to react. They can't make their product any better at this point, so it needs a bigger price advantage. It needs to enter the impulse purchase territory, where not only people that actively want it buy it, but also people who think "hmm, actually why not" pick it up. $249 is close to it, it's almost there, but not quite there. $199 looks much, much sexier, but such a drop comes at a hefty price for the company. On the other hand a $70 drop is financially quite close to a $50 drop. It only costs them a few $ more, considering they don't take the whole $20 of the difference on themselves (only the majority of it ), as a part goes on the retailer and another part is taxes. On the other hand $229 is a very good price that looks very good when compared to $349 of the competition. It allows the retailers to further cut it to $199 if they plan a crazy sale down the road (BF?). Moreover, Nintendo is the pioneer of such cuts (with the 3DS one) and it's proven to be very beneficial for them in the past, so why not repeat it? You're not risking that much more money than in the case of a $50 cut and get a stronger positive effect.

@Italics - I already referred to this in my previous post. Nintendo will cut the price more only if they believe in the system. Cause the system needs a bigger price cut - objectively speaking. The only reason to limit themselves to $249 is because they no longer care and consider Wii U dead. The pricing policy is gonna tell us a lot about their attitude towards the console and its future. They can either follow MS - MS believes in Xbone, they are actively trying to get it better - or they can follow Sony, which declared Vita dead and is not pushing it at all going for the easy profit-maximizing route and not taking any risks.

The thing that puzzles me is that N is so unwilling to cut the price despite the fact, that their consoles sell pretty much only their own exclusives, which in turn almost never fall in price. It really makes the most sense for Nintendo out of all three companies to cut the price and get as many adopters as possible, as they earn more money on games than the competition.

1. How do you determine that $229 is "impulse-buying territory" and $249 is not? Again we don't know the demand curve of the Wii U, and we don't know how certain prices will affect the willingess to pay of hundreds of millions of different consumers. We can guess, but guesses are tough things. You'd have a point if XBO/PS4 were close subsitutes for a Wii U, but they really aren't. It's like saying the price cut of the apple isn't enough because I can buy oranges for a close price. There is a point where I will say, "I just want a fruit and the apple's are too expensive for what I will pay knowing their usual price so I will get an orange instead", but after a certain point I will say, "I really want an apple, so I am going to get an apple. Oranges were subsitutes when I wanted a fruit, but now I want an apple specifically" At that point the consumer end of the market is relatively inelastic (doesn't respond to price changes quickly.) So then we must consider the values of said individuals and how they might change. But we have no idea how the values of individuals in the market might change. Maybe people will be saturated with XBO/PS4's and want a system that gives alternative games to complement their first console.  Maybe people are truly not interested in the Wii U at any reasonable price. Marginal value is always time-dependent. Therefore demand is time dependent. And then equllibrium prices are time-dependent. Because of this, it is really hard to pinpoint what this, "impulse-buying territory" is. For me personally, $250 is not much different from $230. It's not even a game's worth of savings. Neither of which are close to "impulse-buying territory." For somebody not interested in any games on the Wii U their willingness to pay might be less than $100. For that reason, it is very possible that no price will save the Wii U, similar to how $99 didn't save the Gamecube, which was a much closer console to its competition. 

2. This isn't a binary thing. Nintendo could still care about the Wii U, support it, and making money from its sales without taking a loss on its hardware, but at the cost of marketshare. If they think they can sell a lot more software then they will probably make that cost-benefit-risk analysis when they formulate any price-cut decisions and predict future sales. However, a lot of titles don't seem to benefit from a larger userbase. An example is The Legend of Zelda. It's a game that has its best and worst selling titles on the same platforms, and some of its best selling titles on Nintendo's average selling platforms. On the otherhand a game like Mario Kart could gain a lot of sales from a larger userbase. However, the safest thing for Nintendo to do is to not abandon the Wii U by leaving a huge drought at the end of the generation (like they had done with Wii) while still planning for expanding their marketshare with their next platform(s) and maximizing software sales on said platform(s.) 

I do think a price of $199 will greatly benefit sales, especially in markets like Japan, but that isn't always necessarily a good thing. Profit maximization always comes first. 

Well i just hope they can re evaluate the basic price and create new value based on consumer demand and hardware cost depreciation, it's not logic if they have the same price with Xbox one with an old hardware and have less demand. They also had reveal their next future platform "NX" that will be announce in 2016, so it will impact the consumer interest of Wii U, Nintendo need to revise this as soon as possible.

I hope so.

If the NX we see in 2016 is the home console and not the handheld. 

yeah i hope so, because they clearly stated it would be a product that redefine both (or it has the direction of fusion or maybe 2 product at the same time). But still price reevaluations is a must.

I hope they cut the price in September when Mario Maker launches (along with a bundle). That should carry momentum into the holidays with titles like XCX and Star Fox among smaller titles like Fatal Frame, Yoshi and Devil's Third.

2016 shouldn't need the effect of a price drop since it has Zelda and other likely games such as Pokken Fighters, Animal Crossing and maybe Metroid, so 2015 is the best year for it.

Can we bet that if Nx is a home console would  release in 2016?Not really,there is a long trend,I have already posted it here,dolphin(gc) was teased in 1999(third year of n64),was announcend in E32000 and it released in the holidays 2001,Revolution(wii) was teased in 2004(third year of gc) announced on E3 2005 and released in the holidaysr 2006,Nx was teased this year (2015,third year of wii u)Announcement on E3 2016?Probably as ninty said that we will get details for it in 2016,release in the holidays 2017?

I forgot to say that project cafe(wii u) may not followed(completely) this trend obviously because wii was selling tons of units but it was announced in E3 2011 and released in the holidays 2012...;) So that't a proof too!