RiemannMeetLebesgue

40: Obviously I meant what I have read and heard about the Wii's game pricing. The Xbox 360 games I've seen with my own two eyes though. It's true that game prices vary by area, and you're absolutely correct that we're hoping that the 3rd parties pass the savings on to the Wii customers. (A risky bet, I admit.)

I see Vlad has now tried to improve his argument by adding latin. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. (And does he really think we're such numbskulls that he has to explain the phrase in the next sentence?)

Matt, I couldn't agree more. The quality of posts here has decreased lately. Being the kind person I am, I'll just give them a pass and say that it's a result of the Joystiq writers being under a lot of stress with all of this round-the-clock news.

DMF,

That's not entering Xbox 360 territory. That's entering the crappy version of Xbox 360 territory and if you went that route you'd still have no game and only one controller (which is wired, not wireless) for the 360, so there's no comparison.

Oops, that last comment of mine was addressed to 23, not 24.

24: The good 3rd party games for 360 have been 60-65 in my area. Cheap sports games will be cheaper for the Wii too, so no big deal there. What I said definitely holds for the PS3. The Wii does provide the least expensive games, on average, from what I have seen thus far. I honestly don't expect many 60-dollar games for the Wii at all.

79/88,

Let's say that Luigi's Pizza sells pizza and that they want to make a small amount of profit on each pizza. They price their pizza accordingly and with a certain amount of toppings so that the cost of the pizza and toppings, labor, and rent still leaves them some profit. How much each of those toppings costs will determine how many toppings they can provide for a certain price and still make a profit. If pizza proposal A for Price B has too many toppings to make profit C, then they either have to raise B or change A to keep C. In other words, Nintendo either had to raise the price of the Wii or cut back on a thing or two if it wanted to make its desired profit (which I can guarantee you is not that much).

Moe A,

Wrong. Wii games are going to be about 50-55 bucks on average . 360 games are about 60-65 bucks on average. PS3 games are going to be AT LEAST 65 bucks on average. Wii's games are definitely cheaper.

The best thing I can say about this post by Joystiq is that at least it's not entirely full of stupidity like Vlad's last post. But seriously guys, is someone at Joystiq a little mad because they didn't get an invite to the event? Who got left out?

For starters, it did come in under 250 and it came before Thanksgiving. Nintendo never suggested that it would be much less than that or much earlier than that. Anyone who got all excited about the idea of the console costing only 200 bucks and being available in two days has only themselves to blame. So, nice try, but not even close to being disappointing for anyone who actually looked at what Nintendo said. (And we get Wii sports free.)

Next, let's look at the Opera browser. Opera is going to be free for download in Japan, at least until mid 2007. It's quite possible that will happen here. We'll see. But in any event, that was Opera's person talking, not Nintendo.

Now on to Twilight Princess. Why would any company release a game for a cheaper console on the same day as their new console comes out? That's not a let down. I expected it from the beginning. I'm just shocked it wasn't cancelled a long time ago as that would have made more business sense.

As for MP3, it's clearly being delayed for online multiplayer reasons. There were rumors of this months ago. Disappointing, but not really when we've got all of the other titles available at launch.

The only legitimate complaints I see are DVD playback and storage. While them changing their mind on the playback feature is disappointing, Nintendo is absolutely correct to think that it's not needed. I can just imagine how much certain people would gripe if the cost of the console went up another 10 bucks. Storage is an issue, I'll grant you that. That part did have me bummed. Time will tell how Nintendo handles that. Hopefully you will be able to add a hard drive to the Wii.

One thing I've noticed about your blog's coverage versus almost every other blog's coverage is how little attention you are giving to everything that IS coming with the console: Image editing, slideshow creating, a BBS message system (at least for Japan; the "post" function available in the US version of the the imaging editing software strongly suggests to me that BBS will also be available for the US), avatar customization, etc. Yes, you mentioned these things, but they were all relegated to an afterthought in some small update. These are legitimate and unique features and they are indeed the Wii's "final secret". (In addition to the other channels that will be revealed shortly before launch.)

Of course you need to be fair and balanced. I don't argue that. But it bothers me greatly to see such posts complaining about faults in the Wii when a lot of those things aren't really faults to begin with. (Especially the one about how "generous" MS and Sony are for selling their consoles at a loss.)

I find it amusing that you claim the reaction to the prior post was puzzling, because a bunch of the first posts were actually of the type of reaction you were looking for: "Nintendo is ripping us off." "They're trying to make a profit." "Oh Noesssss" (End people with no business sense impression.)

Nintendo knows what it is doing. Let's be clear about one thing: If something happens to make the Wii do poorly, then Nintendo is in deep garbage if it has lost money on the console. This does NOT have to be anything directly related to the quality of the Wii console but could be something as simple as a bad turn in the market. In such a situation, Nintendo is screwed if it's already in the hole.

Again, this isn't rocket science. Microsoft and Sony can afford to lose on their systems and even have them fail miserably and the overall company will still survive because they are not primarily game companies. Nintendo cannot because it's primarily and almost solely a game company. Apple meet Orange.

Companies that stay in business for years do so by making smart business decisions that, while innovative and somewhat risky, still have enough padding so that if something goes wrong they don't go into bankruptcy. They have confidence in their products, yet they realize that things can happen that are entirely out of their control.

In short, this has nothing to do with confidence in product and everything to do with smart business sense.

I am sick to death of the people here who know nothing about business. Nintendo is a video game company. It cannot afford to lose money on a console like Sony and MS can because it doesn't have millions of billions of dollars from other areas to eat up those costs. It HAS to make at least a little on the console. Seriously, get with the program, stop whining about companies actually making *shudder* profits, read up on video game history, and just enjoy the Wii for it is - one hell of a cool system.