X-bit labs

Nintendo Wii to Cost Less than $225 – Official.

Category: Multimedia

by Anton Shilov

[ 05/26/2006 | 04:35 PM ]

Nintendo Corp. has officially set the price limit for its next-generation Wii game console, according to reports. During a call with financial analysts, the company said it would retail the new game machine for “less than ¥25 000.

Nintendo said, its new game console, which is called Wii and which features motion-sensitive game controller, will retail for “less” than ¥25 000, which is currently about $225, a price-point, which was anticipated by analyst earlier this year. The console may really end-up costing just about $199, just a predicted. In addition, the firm is reported to have said that it would ship about 6 million game consoles at launch.

“The ¥25 000 price and its plan to ship 6 million units is a positive indication that there’s high expectation for the Wii,” Takeshi Koyama, a Mizuho Securities analyst, is reported to have said, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this year Scott Steinberg, vice president of marketing for Sega, said in an interview with Forbes that Nintendo’s Wii would cost less than $200, mainly because it does not feature state-of-the-art “heavy-duty” processors like those in PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. Forbes further reported that Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post predicted Thursday that the new machine, which will be released this fall, would sell for $200, a move that could prompt software publishers to create more titles for the gaming system.

Nintendo Wii console will feature IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that will operate at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo revolution will use 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.