How much will the price for Nintendo’s upcoming console be this holiday season?
How much would pay for Nintendo’s next gaming machine? Does $299 sound like a mighty good deal to you, fair reader? That’s the target number the website WiiUDaily has heard from their “industry sources” as being the price for the Nintendo Wii U when it launches this holiday season in North America, Europe, and Japan.
It appears, again from WiiUDaily’s sources, that Nintendo wants to give its new hardware a strong puncher’s chance against its Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 rivals – both system’s costing currently between $200-$250 – and is keenly determined to price the Nintendo Wii U competitively, which if this report turns out to be true, at three hundred dollars USD (299 Euro , 20,000 Yen) will no doubt do. Heck, even I would put my money down at that price.
The Nintendo Wii U’s main caveat is its new controller, a tablet-shaped peripheral with an embedded 6 inch touchscreen (there’s buttons and analog controls too.) Apart from the logical touchscreen applications – that should likely make their way into the next batch of Mario and Zelda games – another key feature of the Wii U is the ability to let a player continue gaming by displaying the game on the controller even when the television is off.
A function like that has to be super hungry in terms of processing, and while no official confirmation about engine specs have been made available to the press, yet, it’s been long speculated that Nintendo Wii U is “50% more powerful” than the Xbox 360 and PS3 – boasting, from an unnamed Japanese game developer, a Quad Core, 3 GHz PowerPC-based 45nm CPU, which is similar to CPU innards of the Xbox 360. To repeat, those are unconfirmed specs, which possibly could have changed (or not changed) by now.
Whatever Nintendo uses for the Wii U, the company has at least stated that the console supports 1080p graphics – yeah, not an amazing tent-pole attraction seeing as the industry is seven years into the age of HD gaming – but hey, no more component cables to deal with and black bars on the sides of our Nintendo games. That’s a win, I guess.
Back to this $299 price for the WiiU report though. Personally, I could see fifty being tacked on to that number. Not because I like paying more for my gaming – “Heavens to Murgatroyd” no – but considering those fancy new controllers, those things can’t be cheap to make. Or are they? I could be totally wrong on that. I guess we won’t know until E3, where Nintendo will certainly inform us of the fine details.
Lock it into Walyou for further gaming news, such as the awesome reveal of Assassin’s Creed 3’s American Revolution setting and the happy possibility that Valve might be getting into the console business.
