In a recent interview with GamesBeat, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata mentioned that while he couldn’t divulge pricing at this time, the Nintendo 3DS would not be sold at a loss to Nintendo.

From the interview:

SI: I have to refrain from talking specifically about the price point. What I can confirm is that, in terms of the production costs, it will cost more than the costs for the Nintendo DS today. Having said that, we believe we will produce enough value worthy of the production cost. We do not think we have to sell the products below cost.

This mirrors Nintendo’s pricing with the Wii, which launched as the only home console at the time to turn profit on hardware sales.

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Despite impressive tech demos at last year’s E3, Microsoft’s recently re-branded “Kinect” and Sony’s Playstation Move controller felt more dated than the “underpowered” Nintendo console they are trying to out-motion. What do we mean by dated? Obviously this has nothing to do with graphical capability or processing power – something on which both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have a marked advantage over the Wii – but implementation. Playing Kinect and Move feel like playing the Wii 4 years ago.

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Nintendo stated during their E3 press conference that they had wanted to finish The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in time for holiday release, but decided instead to aim for an early 2011 release date to ensure quality.  What will they be working on with those extra months? According to Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma, it’s the games visual style.

Speaking of the game at an E3 roundtable, Miyamoto stated, “I think the art style is very unique. I’m a big fan of impressionism in the art world, so we’ve drawn some inspiration from that. The sky and the mountain you can see in the E3 demo have a definite Cézanne feel to them,” eventually finishing with, “if we had just used the same graphics from Twilight Princess the game would already be done.”

Why the revision? The answer may be different than you think.

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Just sayin’.

Major hardware innovations and revisions come and go, often with promises that they will “change everything,” and “forever alter the way we see gaming.”  The Nintendo 3DS delivers on these nonsense PR phrases in a very literal sense, delivering a 3D visual experience without the need for glasses – we are now looking at games in a new way, one that was not previously possible.  It’s actually quite an amazing sight to see – but this wonderful new toy causes me great pain – because in attempt to describe it, I find myself echoing the same nonsense PR shtick I’ve been mocking for years – and I mean every word I say.