How much is this worth to you?

With rumours of the Wii U's technical specs being significantly higher than those of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, it's easy to pin our hopes up too high and expect something that simply isn't. After Shigeru Miyamoto's conversation with GameSpot at E3, it only sounds even more realistic that we should keep our hopes firmly grounded.

When asked how important hardware power is to Nintendo, Miyamoto's response clarified the kind of balance that the company is trying to achieve while acknowledging that consumers will impose certain spending limits:

Nintendo is an entertainment company. We're very sensitive to pricing because people have generally only a certain amount of their spending that they'll devote to entertainment. And if you're talking about parents buying something for kids, there are certain price points where parents may be willing to or not willing to purchase a certain product... But at the same time, you have these technological advances, and you have the needs of being able to take advantage of that technology, and those result in increasing costs and things like that. And so I think that in terms of companies that really look very carefully at what is the best balance between price and possibility in terms of the hardware, Nintendo is the company that's going to probably pay the most attention to striking that right balance.

The Wii U isn't the first time Nintendo has been creative with its chosen control method, and the Wii U controller might be a sign that Nintendo has behaved a bit ― in the words of Miyamoto ― " reckless" with its latest hardware design. Despite all the fancy components that make up the Wii U, it seems having room to experiment with ideas is far more important than getting one up on the technical specs of rival consoles.

So when you look at what we're trying to do this time, which is I think maybe to a certain degree somewhat reckless, because we're trying to include this somewhat kind of tablet-like device--this controller with the screen. We're trying to do that by finding the right balance between the CPU and the GPU, the graphics processor, and bringing all of that together with the ability to take advantage of the HD capabilities of the system, and wanting to do the most that we can on that front as well... We're very sensitive, of course, to trying to do all of this at an appropriate price. So I don't know that we would be able to sit here and say that it's going to necessarily dramatically outperform the systems that are out now. It's part of the balance that we strike in terms of trying to find entertainment that is new and unique.

[source e3.gamespot.com]