Wii, $50 too Expensive?

Editor-in-chief at IGNcube: "So I’ll tell you exactly what I told both Perrin Kaplan and Reggie Fils-Aime when they asked me the same question, which is, I believe Wii is $50 too expensive and three weeks too late.

As a gamer, I want Wii to sell for $200 for a number of reasons. It has about one tenth the processing prowess and one fifth the RAM of, say Xbox 360, and it also lacks a true hard drive. It doesn’t play DVDs. It doesn’t play music CDs. Yes, you read that correctly and yes, it’s true. In fact, in many ways, it could be called a turbo-charged GameCube. So why the $249 price point?

Well, there are certainly reasons for it. It’s easy to shrug off Wii as the least powerful of the three consoles, but consider what Nintendo has done. Wii is roughly half the size of GameCube and it still packs twice the power. It has roughly double the processing prowess, approximately double the RAM, an additional 512MBs of useable flash memory, built in 802.11b/g wireless capabilities and a full docking station for GameCube controllers. The console is backward compatible, in fact, with every GCN title ever made. And I haven’t even mentioned its Wii Channels system or, most importantly, the Wii controller, which could represent one of the biggest hardware innovations the industry has seen in years.

Still, Nintendo says it’s going after the mainstream audience so I want to see it really do that from the start, and a $249 price point is not quite mainstream enough. This is especially true when you consider that many Wii games are designed to be enjoyed by multiple players and each separately sold Wii remote will cost buyers $39.99 plus another $19.99 for the nunchuk attachment. Add in a classic controller or two and all of a sudden we’re well beyond the $300 price point – just so that mom and dad can play Wario Ware."