Wow! I'm surprised this bit of information spurred so much discussion on prices of Nintendo products and HD remakes. LOL!
The way I look at it, $49.99 is a fair price considering three things:
1) It's Zelda. That's reason enough to justify $50. If this were a Game & Wario or NintendoLand type game, then that's another story.We are getting an extensive adventure game, not a bunch of mini games.
2) Most games are being released in the $59.99 range these days, so its really nice when we get a Lego City ($49.99), New Super Luigi U ($19.99 DLC or $29.99 physical) or another game for a nice price cut of $10 or $20, I'm not going to complain.
3) Nintendo games rarely drop in price. Yea, every so often we will get a Metroid Other M or Wii Music, but most of the time we are stuck with games that hold their value. As others have pointed out Wind Waker is not cheap on the 2nd hand market by comparison to other titles released around the same time by other developers. Hell, try finding a reasonably priced copy of Twilight Princess for the GameCube, and that game is easily locatable on the Wii.
When you take into account that Nintendo is putting more than the minimum amount of work needed to get this game into HD, I think $50 is fair. $60 is pushing it. $40 would be a dream, but unrealistic.