The Wii U has been making a lot of headlines recently because lets face it, we’ve all been eagerly awaiting Nintendo announcing what was going to be their successor to the Wii. If you’ve been following gaming news, even loosely, you likely knew it was coming as rumors were running rampant during the first half of 2011. Well now the details are out and I am far from impressed.
One of the things that I’ve always heard when comparing the original Wii to other consoles was it’s price. That was a huge selling point for many people when it came to deciding if they should pick up a Wii or not. I don’t know if Nintendo realizes this or not, but the majority of gamers are cheap, like really cheap. We take the path of least cost, in most cases, to get our entertainment and that played into the Wii’s success story.
However, the Wii U is going to have a hard time at coming anywhere close to what the original Wii cost strictly because they are going for more of a wow factor this time. The hardware supporting the console is going to be more expensive and then to add on top of that they are going to have a controller that is going to have a touch screen inside of it. I foresee the cheapest that this console would be released at is $350 with them taking a loss on each console that would be recouped on games. More realistically I see it being sold for $499 with additional remotes being in the $150 – $200 range.
One way around this would be to cut down on the quality of the components used to create the console and remote, but that would just leave sub-par and sub-standard console that would be shunned by the hard core gamers that the Wii U seems to put more of a focus on. To put aside that fact you still have to consider to get the full enjoyment and entertainment out of the new console you need the new controller, well what if you want to play with more than one player?
Extra controllers are already expensive enough, no matter which console you look at. Having a console with a touch screen built into it is not going to be cheap if it is decent quality. So if you want to consistently play with more than one person, to avoid fights over the new cool remote, you’re going to have to buy a second. This just adds to the over all price of the console. That’s one of the things that I feel like Microsoft got spot on with the Kinect, there is no need for additional remotes to each additional player.
Finally, the last thing that has me irked over the Wii U is the fact that even though it will now support high definition output it will be using a proprietary disc format. To me that reads that you still won’t be able to play CDs, DVDs or Blu-Rays on the console. On our main gaming television we don’t have a need for a DVD player, because we have both a PlayStation 3 and an XBOX 360 if we want to watch movies. While nothing more than an inconvenience to most gamers, it’s a feature that is nice to have and adds value to the console.
“More realistically I see it being sold for $499 with additional remotes being in the $150 – $200 range.”
What additional remotes are you talking about? Even a full set of WiiMote + MotionPlus + Nunchuck bought separately costs you max. 80$ (if you are actually searching to pay high prices).
It has already been stated that the tablet will be a “one per console” thing.
Maybe do a little research before sounding so important…
So had not seen the comment that was made about the touch screen remote “Likely being one per console”.
Of course being that this is still very early on that may change, and is likely to. Who wants to be the odd player out who gets stuck with the old Wii remotes? Not to mention they may get pressured to as it would be a good way to earn extra revenue off of the console.