Nintendo Wii U may be priced at £250 (Rs. 21,000)

Due to a lack of information from Nintendo, there have been many rumours about how much the Wii U, their next generation console will cost. The only concrete facts we know about the machine are that the controller will have a tablet-like touchscreen, that the console’s hardware will be at least 50 percent more powerful than the current generation of consoles of their competitors - the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, and some of the launch titles for the console. Nintendo has also released the technical specifications of their next console.

Earlier, Amazon had reported that the Wii U would cost £199 (roughly Rs. 17,000), but they had to remove the listing and the pre-orders because that was not what the price was supposed to be. Amazon’s mistake came at the expense of the consumers who pre-ordered Nintendo’s next generation console. Various sources are now reporting that the Wii U will cost around £50 more than the price that Amazon had listed.

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Nikkei, a Japanese business newspaper, has recently claimed that the Wii U will release for about ¥30,000, which is roughly £250. For the sake of comparison, the PlayStation 3, 160GB model has an MSRP of ¥24,980, and the Wii’s MSRP is ¥20,000 in Japan. The newspaper also reports that the Wii U will support non-game content, including a car navigator, books, and a karaoke service with around 10,000 songs. An unnamed senior publisher had talked to MCV UK, stating that the Wii U “will definitely be less than £249.”

May cost £250 at release

With the Wii U, Nintendo promises that it won’t miss out on multiplatform games, because the hardware will be much closer to what Sony and Microsoft will have to offer.

“We have not successfully kept the momentum of the Wii for about the last two years because third-party publishers have released a smaller number of game titles and Nintendo has also decreased new games for the platform in preparation for the launch of the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U,” said Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, at an annual meeting with shareholders.

Nintendo also seems to be really focusing on the touchscreen on their controller for the console. Iwata hopes that the Wii U’s innovative GamePad controller with the screen will help the console to be different from what Microsoft or Sony would be doing, and hopes to change the way people think about a gaming console.

Analyst from Sterne Agee, Arvind Bhatia, commented, “Some of the developers we spoke to indicated to us that the console will have 50 percent more processing power compared to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. This is yet to be confirmed by Nintendo.”

So how much will Nintendo’s next generation console cost? The best we can do till Nintendo says anything is to speculate.