Iwata pledges to keep Revolution software prices down

Software prices for Nintendo's Revolution console will buck the trend of next-generation titles being priced more expensively than their current-gen counterparts, with Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata expecting to keep prices below $50.

Although Nintendo can only directly control the prices of its first-party titles, it's those games which are likely to set the pricing benchmark for the system - and Iwata told CNN/Money in a new interview that he "cannot imagine any first party title could be priced for more than $50."

That's well below the $60 price points being mooted by many publishers for next-generation software, which has already been seen on some Xbox 360 titles - a pricing strategy of which Iwata is openly critical.

"In the US, we're going to see the next generation cost an awful lot," he told CNN. "I really don't think that there's going to be a lot of acceptance by current customers of the $60 price tag. They may allow that for a limited number of premium titles, but not all."

While Nintendo's resistance to price inflation is unlikely to endear it to the publishers currently pushing for the industry's baseline software price to rise, Iwata's stance is at least partially justified by the company's commitment to keeping development costs down - with the Revolution being cited as by far the cheapest next-gen system to create titles for, thanks to mature hardware and development tools enabled by a specification only a few times more powerful than existing platforms.