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Wii to Launch Nov. 19th for $250
PygmySurfer writes "According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nintendo is going to announce today that the Wii will go on sale on November 19th in North and South America, at a cost of $250. It will come bundled with Wii Sports and channels for such things as viewing photos, as well as news and weather. Finally, Wii will also make it possible to browse the web on your television. Nintendo will also announce that 25-30 games will be published this year, as well as about 30 classic games available on the virtual console, costing about $5-10."
The article came out before the Japanese conference. (Which is happening as I type this) They're live blogging it over at kotaku
I'll believe it when they Iwata announces it.
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Personally, I start to lose count after a squillion frames a second, I'm sure my eyeballs are only getting 800x600 resolution these days, and I'm just totally over the idea of paying $500+ for a machine, and $50+ for games, when they're extremely high-res, high-speed, and SHIT. The Wii gives me hope that there's something out there for people who like gameplay, not graphics, and have better things to spend the big bucks on than a friggin' procrastinaion console. Nice one, Nintendo.
C'mon! Bundle Zelda! You'll sell fifteen billion of them.
Have to say, that I think Nintendo have got the pricing just spot on! No only for the console itself, but for the classic games ($5 -> $10), a very very clever strategic move.
No only that, but the price of the new games at ~$10 less than the X360 - gives a clear indication that Nintendo see the X360 as their main competition. Maybe they think that Sony have dropped the ball with their pricing and PR machines!?
No, I'm not a fan boy of any console (in fact I'm a dedicated PC gamer) - but it seems that Nintendo have employed some very smart people for this entire project, considering no-one was really thinking them as a major console player (again) and then last years' E3 and, suddenly, they are ahead of everyone else in terms of buzz. Clever stuff.
I have a feeling that we'll find out very very different released in Japan and the other territories. The Seattle PI article seemed very reliable and sourced Reggie himself in a phone interview. I have a feeling that they're both right.
Japan gets a $200 console with one controller, North America gets a $250 with 2 controllers and Wii Sports to help "sell" the common people on the system.
Either way, I'm going to bed. This will all be sorted out by 11am tomorrow morning.
I'm definitely interested in the Wii, and I'm no fanboy. I have never owned a console (apart from the Philips Videopak I had as a kid). Why the Wii, and not PS3 or Xbox? Well, where is the innovation in Xbox and PS3? They seem to be the exact same stuff as their predecessors were, just with prettier graphics. Higher resolutions and more polygons does not equal "innovation". And Sony has been screwing up everything recently, starting with the rootkit-fiasco right down to the PS3-pricing. Because of those reasons, I will steer clear of PS3. Xbox is boring as well. And they are both big machines that run hot.
Now, the Wii.... The price is right, and it actually seems INTERESTING. And it seems that it will have games that even the Mrs. could enjoy. So which to get? PS3 or Xbox which are exactly the same as consoles before them were, the games are just shinier. OTOH, the Wii is quite cheap, and they are actually trying to do something new with it.
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You can thank Sony and Microsoft for that. With the Xbox and the PS3 so expensive, there's not a whole lot of reason for Nintendo to go too low with the price. Besides, if the price is too low compared to the competition, customers will perceive it as being "cheap" and thus not worthy of their attention. Anyway, it's not going to matter. Nintendo will sell a shitload of these at US$250. They would sell a shitload at US$350, I guess. I know I'll buy one as soon as I can.
And since they bundle a game (I'd have bought the Sports game if it wasn't bundled), it's not a bad deal anyway.
Include the cost of the base emulator and amortize the cost. You're still looking at an incredibly low value relative to most modern games.
True and false. One, most emulators (NES and SNES) are able to run a ton of games without exceptions. Two, for those emulators that do need to make exceptions, that remains only true for *those* games. Given that not every game is remotely being offered for sale, one has to recognize that a well written emulator has a high chance of covering most (though probably not all) games without hacks. Ie, the cost to develop the emulator becomes the bigger focus of all games at a greater cost to all instead of making hacks for every game. The former is almost certainly more cost effective. The exception is N64 games, which probably *will* need to be heavily hacked. That has more to do with the fact that the N64 games will probably not emulated but virtualized or recompiled.
Uh, no. While it's possible that Nintendo may opt to rewrite their own games to work with the emulator, it's unlikely that Nintendo will actually do so. It's cheaper to hire current developers to make a better emulator than it is take people in upper management and demote them temporarily to developers to work on the code they or their peers wrote. Really, it's very unlikely that they'll go about patching many, if any, games, except possible to fix bugs in the original programs.
Very true. Yet, this cost is relatively small compared to creating games from scratch for the emulated system, let alone making new games for the GBA, DS, or Wii. Any claims that the money is to pay for "development costs" is a best misplaced given that the emulator itself is part of the cost of the console. Or would you believe that Sony has a viable argument to charge more for PS1 games played on the PS2 (after all, it's more work to support PS1 games and do all sorts of tweaks to get them to run on the PS2)? The simple fact is, people (me included) were under the impression that Nintendo was going to make a profit on these old properties but at a much lower price (okay, that's not true; we were hoping they'd offer more reasonable prices but assumed they wouldn't given the whole Classic NES line of GBA games). In the end, the amortized cost of doing bug fixing on the ROMs themselves will be, I imagine, incredibly low. I just find it hard to believe that the bug testing can work out to 1/5th the cost of a Wii game given that Wii games themselves require their own bug testing.
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Bundling a game by force at least means retailers will have to think twice about "compulsory bundling" like they did with the XBox360. Remember when the Playstation 2 came out? A lot of people bought one in the beginning because they wanted a new console but ALSO because their original Playstation 1 was completely hosed through 6 years of play. They come into the store, with their $500 for the new box, and... oh.. I have to buy one of these "packs" with 2 shitty racing games in it? All I wanted was the PS2, the demo disk, a new Dual Shock ('cos my old one is friiied) and to play all my old games maybe with some texture filtering. Denied. Disappointed. Hand over the $750 :(
I love love love the browser, and the weather thing, and virtual console.. just seeing R-Type in Nintendo's Japanese presentation made me wet. I want to play Super Mario World again, and when I get stuck, I want to press the HOME button, fire up Opera, and look for the GameFAQs article. Oh no more running for a magazine or booting the PC just for that!
Playing all those old Gamecube games for $5-$10 in the bargain and second-user bins at Gamestop will keep me happy for SOOOO long.
Yeah we'd all like it to cost $150, but Nintendo are apparently going to sell the Wii at a profit in contrast to the super-expensive loss-making XBox360 and Playstation 3. They have plenty of scope to cost reduce, lower consumer prices in the future, without it being a real financial tussle for them.
HOORAY! I've never been this excited about a games console in my life.
Holy shit! You're right! Pure speculation does suggest that the controller will be uncomfortable to use for long periods!
Damn... if only Nintendo had thought to test the controller for 30-40min consecutively, they could have noticed this problem and corrected it before release.... too late now....... why didn't you say something sooner?!
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