Shigeru Miyamoto Says Wii U Price Will be Competitive

The Wii U was announced with much hype at the E3 2011 trade event but there were two important details missing from the Nintendo presentation: the expected price of the new home console and the launch window for the hardware.

Now Shigeru Miyamoto, who is the most important video game designer at Nintendo, has said that the company is still spending a lot of time on making sure that it delivers innovation and computing power with the Wii U while at the same time keeping the price point affordable for the current market.

He stated in an interview with Gamespot, “We're very sensitive to pricing because people have generally only a certain amount of their spending that they'll devote to entertainment. And if you're talking about parents buying something for kids, there are certain price points where parents may be willing to or not willing to purchase a certain product.”

Miyamoto added, “But at the same time, you have these technological advances, and you have the needs of being able to take advantage of that technology, and those result in increasing costs and things like that.”

The veteran video game designer has also dismissed the concept that the new touch screen powered controller for the Wii U, which also incorporates analog controls and motion tracking, was in any way inspired by the successful iPad tablet from Apple.

Apparently Nintendo has been working on the technology for some years and has long term plans for it.

The Wii U is set to be as if not more powerful than the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony, a move that Nintendo made in order to attract first person shooters to the new device.

The company is interested in making its new console as appealing as possible to all categories of gamers.