Soon-to-be owners of the Wii U Basic model will have just 3GB of internal storage available to them, Nintendo has confirmed.

Wii U users hoping to make the most the of the console's internal flash memory will find themselves with less space to work with than they might expect.
The advertised internal memory capacity for the two Wii U SKUs is 8GB for the Basic model and 32GB for the Deluxe.

As is the case with all mass storage devices, you usually end up with slightly less than that for actual use due to file indexing and other storage-related complexities.

But the Wii U will also set aside 4.2GB for firmware updates and profile data - quite a large amount of storage for such things.

All said and done, Nintendo of Japan confirms (via Kotaku translations) that this will leave users of the 8GB WIi U Basic model with just 3GB of useable storage, while the 32GB Deluxe model will give you 25GB.

To put that into perspective, Wii U discs hold 25GB of data. Retail games - many of which will be available as digital downloads - won't always necessarily use the full disc capacity however; New Super Mario Bros. U is 2GB in size, while Nintendo Land is 3.2GB.