Nintendo have announced launch details for the Wii U, the first ‘next gen’ console or the last, depending on your viewpoint and manufacturer affiliation.
UK and American details are expected this afternoon, but we can make some guesses based on the Japanese information that has emerged in the last hour.
In short, there’ll be two models – a standard and a premium. UK pricing is going to be around £210 for the basic model (which comes with 8gb of storage and will be white) and another £40 for the premium (which has 32gb, and is black). Additional gamepads are expected to cost upwards of £100, such is the price for such technology.
32gb, by anyone’s standards, is not enough for a ‘premium’ console – that thing will fill up very quickly if Nintendo are wanting to push digital downloads.
Both Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendo Land will be available separately as both retail and download, suggesting there’s no pack-in for the console this time around, odd after the success of Wii Sports.
Spec wise it’s a 2gb console, with games able to use half of that. We’re also chasing details on something called Nintendo Network Premiuim.
These prices and details, obviously, may differ later today for other markets.
Awayze
£100 for a not so high res resistive touchscreen? Rip off. So this Wii U can achieve graphics on Uncharted 3’s scale?
jeccross
Seriously, it’s resistive?
wow.
Dom El
Sadly it looks like this will be the first Nintendo home console I won’t own – much as I want to play Pikmin 3. It just costs too much, and so far I haven’t seen anything else for it that would justify that amount at launch.
Tanzil
Yet it’ll sell like mad because it’s Nintendo. The prices seem ok tbh. Bar the controllers being £100 and 8gb on the basic version but still. I can see them releasing one with much more disk space in the future anyways…
Burgess_101
£100 for a controller? No way.
leeroye
32 gig is classed as premium, LMAO. An extra £50 for for 24 gig more space than the basic verison. Hmm, sounds like nintendo have been taking pricing lessons off Apple
Tanzil
i c wut u did thar lol.
LTG Davey
…actually that £40 difference gives you 24GB additional storage (bit pointless given it supports external HDDs but ho-hum), controller/console stands, 500 nintendo points and a 10% discount off store items for 2 years.
Whilst the home edition will be sufficient for my needs, that seems like quite a few extras for the price of one game.
OneShotWook
I don’t see anywhere state that external Hd support is universal and not some proprietary scam Davey?
KeRaSh
Compare that to the price hikes when you buy an iPad or iPhone with more storage. :P
Kreisash
Don’t forget that the original Wii in Japan also didn’t have Wii Sports bundled where as US and UK did.
I’m hoping for £250 for premium although I can imagine that they won’t come with a game for this price.
I very much doubt you’d want extra tablet controllers at launch or that many games will use it to any spectacular degree so not bothered by the cost of that (unless I break mine).
Also, since we don’t know what the plan is about games DL and storage, 32GB seems enough for now providing that the custom HD optical drive is fast enough to play from disc rather than requiring install of games (unlike the PS3).