Wii for $250 on November 19th?
One last rumour before the conference! The Japanese conference should start in a few minutes (well, from the point at which I started writing) but Seattle Pi seems to have the details already! What do they have to say? Well, at the conference it seems Nintendo will announce that they’ll launch the Wii in North America at $250 US on November 19th.
The $250 console will come bundled with Wii Sports. 25 to 30 games will be released by the end of the year for the console. Alongside that, about 30 Virtual Console games will be made available at launch. The games will cost between $5 and $10. Wii games will cost $50 US, which is $10 less than Xbox 360 games and the same as GameCube games.
New features will also supposedly be unveiled. There will be a camera channel for displaying photos on the TV. There will be an interactive news and whether channel. It will also have the Opera web browser to browse the internet on the TV.
“We are including all of these capabilities as part of our overall strategy to expand the gaming market,” Reggie Fils-Aime said. “Broadening the market is important because it will breathe new life into this business. Otherwise, this industry is moving down a path of being more and more limited to the hard-core gamer.”
Don’t take this all as fact just yet. We’ll find out soon enough if this is all true. They might have just seen all the predictions and jumped the gun. Or they might have in fact received a press release and then published it online so we can all have a look.
Update: IGN has just posted confirmation that New York Times broke an embargo and published the news early. We’ll all be taking this information as the real deal unless Nintendo tells us that they lied to throw us off or something. You never know, right? Nintendo expects to ship 4 million Wiis by the end of the year which should be at least twice that of the PS3.
One last rumour before the conference! The Japanese conference should start in a few minutes (well, from the point at which I started writing) but Seattle Pi seems to have the details already! What do they have to say? Well, at the conference it seems Nintendo will announce that they’ll launch the Wii in North America at $250 US on November 19th.
The $250 console will come bundled with Wii Sports. 25 to 30 games will be released by the end of the year for the console. Alongside that, about 30 Virtual Console games will be made available at launch. The games will cost between $5 and $10. Wii games will cost $50 US, which is $10 less than Xbox 360 games and the same as GameCube games.
New features will also supposedly be unveiled. There will be a camera channel for displaying photos on the TV. There will be an interactive news and whether channel. It will also have the Opera web browser to browse the internet on the TV.
“We are including all of these capabilities as part of our overall strategy to expand the gaming market,” Reggie Fils-Aime said. “Broadening the market is important because it will breathe new life into this business. Otherwise, this industry is moving down a path of being more and more limited to the hard-core gamer.”
Don’t take this all as fact just yet. We’ll find out soon enough if this is all true. They might have just seen all the predictions and jumped the gun. Or they might have in fact received a press release and then published it online so we can all have a look.
Update: IGN has just posted confirmation that New York Times broke an embargo and published the news early. We’ll all be taking this information as the real deal unless Nintendo tells us that they lied to throw us off or something. You never know, right? Nintendo expects to ship 4 million Wiis by the end of the year which should be at least twice that of the PS3.
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