Wii U consoles now in stock on Gamestop online only Basic/Deluxe $300/$350

Twice the graphics power of a 7 year old CONSOLE? Now that's impressive...

Quote from podapatti : ... it's never gonna' hit $600. The Wii has very poor marketing + hype behind it atm, so it'll flop... there's no way it's gonna' hit $600. The only thing they have workin' for 'em is artificial supply constraints (Apple's been doing this on a bigger scale with the iPhone 5 / iPad mini -- and this has let 'em constantly stay in the news... but no one care about Nintendo) There's about ~45% of America wishing they could skip over Christmas [nbcnews.com]because of the tough economic times -- no one's gonna shell out 2X market value for a shitty console.

It already did hit $600, veteran flippers like myself knew to get in early and offer preorders on amazon after the retail preorders sold out. Sold 8 of em and then moved on. Then the wave of hopeful scalpers swept the country only to be disappointed when the market tanked. Makes me laugh every year.

Quote from hollyw00d : It already did hit $600, veteran flippers like myself knew to get in early and offer preorders on amazon after the retail preorders sold out. Sold 8 of em and then moved on. Then the wave of hopeful scalpers swept the country only to be disappointed when the market tanked. Makes me laugh every year.

Wii has been out for four days and this guy thinks the market 'tanked'. There's 30 days till Christmas. Flippers will make their money in two weeks. Maybe not $600, but $500 easy for a deluxe.

Quote from zackj3 : Wii has been out for four days and this guy thinks the market 'tanked'. There's 30 days till Christmas. Flippers will make their money in two weeks. Maybe not $600, but $500 easy for a deluxe.

Don't assume anything, I still have 4 deluxes that I can take back, and I'm waiting to see what the prices go to. But I've been doing this a long time, and I am hearing stores getting shipments all the time (my local best buy just got a big shipment in last night)

There are over 6000 unites for sale RIGHT NOW on Ebay and Amazon, along with the online retailers getting them in sporadically. The prices are a very small markup for most units sold on secondary market.

So it looks like the shortage problem is reseller driven, which will eventually die out. But if it doesn't, I'll make more money. I'm not hopeful though. Just way too many out there now, which is what I figured would happen. Gotta be ahead of the game when it comes to this stuff.

Like anything else there IS a difference between the veteran resellers versus the amateur resellers. It seems that experience and good intuition is what a veteran reseller possesses. It's the same as when the housing bubble occurred, there were plenty of newb real estate agents. When the bubble burst, the newb real estate agents couldn't sell any more but veteran real estate agents continued on and adjusted to the new market.

Quote from xxx : It really depends on how the developers use the processing power. The "developer" you're talking about is for Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper. That particular game was CPU-intensive, so it affected his game a lot. Games that rely more on GPU will find that the Wii U's performance will be better, but not "next gen" better sort of speak. The Wii U has double the RAM of XBOX and PS3, and that makes a big difference. When I play games on the PC, I find that the framerate is most affected by the GPU rather than the CPU. That might be why Nintendo opted for a better GPU rather than a better CPU. But if you're buying things based on processing power, you'd rather buy a powerful video card for the PC and run games via PC. Nothing can really beat the graphics power of a PC if you shell out the money for it. As for why I would buy a Wii U even though I already have a powerful PC, it's because Nintendo has a lot of exclusive titles: Mario, Kirby, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Zelda to name a few. If Nintendo didn't have these titles, I'd pass on the system. Those exclusive titles have always been memorable, and are great fun to play with other people (especially casual gamers). So I see the Wii U system more like a party toy, rather than a powerhouse gaming console. For that, I'd choose my PC any time of the day.

I agree that one should choose a console system based on the exclusive games since the rest of the 3rd party games are now virtually identical across the systems.

As for the Nintendo's choice of GPU, having more than twice the ram of the Xbox 360 and PS3 will make it easier for the developers to code and they don't have to heavily rely on compressing graphics data. Also, given that the Wii U's memory bandwidth for the CPU and GPU together is 12.8GB/s, it will not make a drastic difference even if it does have more eDram than the other consoles, which have nearly twice the memory bandwidth. For example, Xbox 360 memory bandwidth is effectively 22.4 GB/s. There's no use in comparing 7 year old console GPU to current PC GPUs that will run circles around the consoles until the true next gen systems come out.

it figures i bought a deluxe off ebay last night for $410. atleast i didnt pay too much more oh well.

Butthurt resellers bmad. It's ok, enjoy that stack of crappy kidsoles.

Quote from STICKYBUMPS : Butthurt resellers bmad. It's ok, enjoy that stack of crappy kidsoles.

Oh my god - you mean we can't return unopened consoles in the worst case scenario!?

Quote from hollyw00d : Don't assume anything, I still have 4 deluxes that I can take back, and I'm waiting to see what the prices go to. But I've been doing this a long time, and I am hearing stores getting shipments all the time (my local best buy just got a big shipment in last night) There are over 6000 unites for sale RIGHT NOW on Ebay and Amazon, along with the online retailers getting them in sporadically. The prices are a very small markup for most units sold on secondary market. So it looks like the shortage problem is reseller driven, which will eventually die out. But if it doesn't, I'll make more money. I'm not hopeful though. Just way too many out there now, which is what I figured would happen. Gotta be ahead of the game when it comes to this stuff.

Saw one last night for $398 on Amazon and got one.. Paid $3.99 shipping and looking for another one. Not sure how much they made our of this deal but who cares. I got a deal without running around.

As someone who owns a Wii-U (and uses it), I've actually quite enjoyed the system. Super Mario U does a better job at giving us the nostalgia of of classic side scrolling mario games, but with way better graphics, new content and ideas, different game modes, and 5 person multiplayer (had a blast with the gamepad boost mode!). NintendoLand is for Wii-U as WiiSports was for original Wii... but better! Played this one for hours last night with some friends and were cracking up laughing all night, with some trash talking thrown in.

Anyone who says the Wii-U is a joke, simply hasn't experienced one or is stuck in a "its not as powerful as bla bla console" fanboy bubble. I own a 360 and PS3 (as well as several previous gen consoles going back to original NES) and I still think the Wii-U has value. I can't recommend the system YET if you just want it for solo gaming, but that's because we haven't hit the release of new solo play-based games. Most games out exist on other consoles already, or are meant for multiple people. Give it time, Wii-U will do better than the Wii did.


As for those looking to flip and get double their money like the Xbox 360 did, don't hold your breath. The availability of Wii-U consoles won't be bad like the Wii or 360 was, but also I can see demand rising closer to Christmas as more people learn about the existance of the Wii-U. I'd bet you could get 450, maybe 500 for a deluxe model before Christmas hits.

Quote from UnimatrixZero : "Twice the graphics power of an xbox 360?" lol, whatever you've been drinking, I'll have some of that. Developers have already complained about Wii U's weak CPU that is weaker than Xbox 360's 7 year old CPU. The Wii U's GPU on the other hand is only slightly better.

You're a bit misinformed. Xbox360 GPU was basically an ATI Radeon X1900 level GPU, Wii-U is somewhere around a Radeon DH 4770. The order of AMD/ATI GPU goes X1000->HD2000->HD3000->HD4000. That's beyond double the graphics power, and definitely beyond "slightly". The hold back is the CPU, but devs have found ways to utilize the system so that the CPU doesn't stop them. Trine 2, for example, has parts that run great on Wii-U, but had to be downscaled to run on PS3/Xbox360 since those systems couldn't do it properly otherwise.
http://www.geek.com/articles/game...-20121010/

Also, THQ clarrified what the dev of Metro Last Light had said about the Wii-U abilities; giving a more proper understanding of why the game likely won't go to Wii-U, and not because the system isn't powerful enough...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles...rn-remains

Quote from CooLJoE8 : You're a bit misinformed. Xbox360 GPU was basically an ATI Radeon X1900 level GPU, Wii-U is somewhere around a Radeon DH 4770. The order of AMD/ATI GPU goes X1000->HD2000->HD3000->HD4000. That's beyond double the graphics power, and definitely beyond "slightly". The hold back is the CPU, but devs have found ways to utilize the system so that the CPU doesn't stop them. Trine 2, for example, has parts that run great on Wii-U, but had to be downscaled to run on PS3/Xbox360 since those systems couldn't do it properly otherwise. http://www.geek.com/articles/game...-20121010/ Also, THQ clarrified what the dev of Metro Last Light had said about the Wii-U abilities; giving a more proper understanding of why the game likely won't go to Wii-U, and not because the system isn't powerful enough... http://www.eurogamer.net/articles...rn-remains

The Xbox 360's GPU is based on ATI's R500 and is architecturally from the X1900. You're comparing console GPU to PC GPU but they aren't comparable in the manner that you're thinking. When Xbox 360 first came out, that console's GPU greatly outperformed the equivalent PC GPU since the console is specialized for that task.

So NO, you're not getting DOUBLE the graphics performance when there are plenty of bottlenecks with the Wii CPU and the graphics sub system. The devs have not even identified what the problem is. Maybe they'll figure it out as time goes on but as of now, they haven't, even according to both the articles you linked. When you have a CPU that is a bottleneck to the GPU, you'll have problems and will be limited in how many characters can be displayed at any one time. Since the Wii GPU is of a newer generation, it is more efficient (No, it's not the most current tech. It doesn't compare to AMD 7970, nor Nvidia 680). Of course it can run games natively at 1080P while Xbox 360 and PS3 upscales theres from 720P or so.

Either ways, the graphics of the Wii U does not perform double that of the other consoles. That's like saying Apple's iPad 4 is double the CPU performance of iPad 3 but NO ONE can see that difference when difference is only .5 to 2 seconds in responsiveness when starting games/apps. You'll see no distinguishable difference graphically in the iPad 4 and 3's graphics. It's only in the benchmarks and it doesn't translate to real world difference.

Quote from hollyw00d : veteran flippers like myself

I didn't know buying bulk and selling on ebay was an effing science

Don't flatter yourself.