Why the Nintendo Wii’s price is not excessive

£150 would have been the perfect price for an xmas run up. Nintendo is far from poor, they would have had no problem absorbing the cost, I’m sure they could have even done it for under a £100 push come to shove.
I’m sure some was added on after they found out the PS3 would be delayed.

Time to trade in the my gamecube and games then….never opened my game cube…hmmmm.

Nope sorry, your points don’t wash. It isn’t that much more powerful than the cube. Wii sports wont be full proper games more rushed demos of the Wii mote. And saying we always pay more so don’t moan is a bit lame. We pay more because they charge more and we don’t complain.

I aint buying the thing until it drops below £130…

Hey, I’ll take the controller if you want to offload it for £10. :P

And actually Leon, you’re wrong. The economy is fairly wild right now, and if you were to walk into New York next week you could literally get £100 worth of games for £50. No, that’s not nonsense; I know people who’ve done it, the maths works out, and I think even CrazyMAC above has done it. At the moment $1 = 50p, while not too many years ago it was more like $1 = 80p. The dollar is weak — that’s a fact.

Not to mention that our minimum wage is something like double the US counterpart, plus many other variables. You cannot directly compare the two economies; we pay what we pay because it’s how our country is. We’re not getting ripped off just because the Americans only pay £25 for an Xbox 360 game while we pay £50; it’s simply because our economy is a lot stronger and can take it.

Nintendo is pricing their hardware for a profit, and not a loss as other companies have been doing, and this may be where some of the comments are stemming from. Nintendo has been doing this for generations, it’s nothing new.

To me, the price seems reasonable. I won’t be picking one up at launch, though I may eventually. Third party titles won’t have multiplayer support at launch, because nintendo did not make the necessary libraries available to developers. I play games for the multiplayer experience these days, which is why I have been an Xbox fanboy the past two generations.

I will, however, be purchasing a black DS Lite soon.

I’d like to throw a bit of an American perspective into this if I may. Here in the States, the Wii will be $249 (I’m no good at doing the conversion but I’m sure the numbers I will use will make sense regardless of the currency). Since 1st party games are $50, that means the actual price of the hardware alone is $200. Now besides the fact that the 360 is wx that price and the PS3 is 3x that price, here is the mind blowing part. All of Nintendo’s consoles going back to the NES in the 1980’s have sold for $200, which means for 20 years they have kept their cost at the same price! When you consider that economists will tell you that the price of consumer goods doubles every 20 years, N should be charging $400 for the Wii here, and even more in Europe. So think about that before you go complaining about the price.

Nicely put, you two. What you’ve said is pretty much spot on.

And yeah, Russ, the price is pretty much in line with every Nintendo console thus far here too. I really do think the price is fine considering the playtime I’m likely to get out of it. Heck, I’ve gotten my value for money out of my GameCube twenty times over thanks to a few specific games like Mario Kart alone! And the GameCube pretty much zero non-gaming purpose, while the Wii looks like it’s going to have some nice extras to get that little bit more value out of it.

I think a lot of people are continually forgetting that the Wii really is a next generation console, and for some reason were expecting it to cost more towards the price of a DS (which is what it would do if it were much cheaper), and even the PSP was £50 more than the Wii will launch at a few months ago. That comparison really puts it into perspective for me.

I’m convinced it’s the fact that the major leap is in controls and interface rather than graphics. It’s something most simply cannot wrap their heads around since they’ve been using technical prowess as a measurement of console worth for years. The way Microsoft and Sony managed to wow the mainstream market with their “X teraflops! ;D” comments last year are absolute evidence of this.

So Ryan, you may have a point about the money side but you never addressed my other two points?

What you may consider rushed demos, others may think of as very entertaining ways to pass the time when you don’t fancy anything more engrossing. Heck, I often play the same old several maps with someone on Mario Kart Double Dash to kill some time simply because it’s fun. I imagine Wii Sports will fill a similar role for many, including me.

And I know the Wii isn’t _that_ much more powerful than the GameCube — I even said that myself in the original post. The jump in graphics is nowhere near as pronounced as it is with Microsoft and Sony’s offerings, but the point of the Wii is to offer new gameplay via a different way of control and interface rather than via upgrading GPUs and CPUs.

If you’re incapable of accepting a generation to stand primarily for control and play experience rather than technology then the Wii clearly isn’t for you. I don’t hold anything against you for that; you’ll simply be happier with an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Don’t let me stop you getting one.

if you ask me, we should just let the big N work thier magic and stop spoiling evythang ‘n just buy it when it gets some new games, me personaly, download games off virtual console, other than twilight princess anyhow.