TWRoO said:
Baggins said:
TWRoO said:
Clearly it isn't.
Price is not the sum of it's components... I have said this before. The price should be put at whatever point customers are willing to pay for. So the Wii is priced perfectly.
The DS is somewhere between N64 and Dreamcast graphically, should it be priced at $20?
The PSP is about as powerful as a PS2, should it have a price cut?
The PS2 is less powerful than the GameCube and Xbox were.... so why was it's price higher? |
Goes without saying, but I don't think that is what the OP was asking.
Price of the Wii has actually gone UP a couple of months ago in the UK...Of course they can sell it for what they like cos it's so popular etc. I'm quite sure everyone is aware of this! But we are being ripped off. ;)
Cost to produce it is so small, it's not like they are clawing back the costs of R&D like say IntelAMD where a chip might cost to a consumer around 50x the cost of production. Nintendo are just exploiting you all and you're all happy about it...Good for everyone I guess in a kinda retarded way. But I don't own a Wii, I don't think it's worth it :) I think a PS3 represents better value.
|
The PS3 has no value to anyone who doesn't want to play it's games.... value has nothing to do with how much it costs to produce.
The Wii was reported to be making $48 per unit in America, $70ish in Europe and was it $17 (I think?) at launch in Japan.
That was an estimate on parts alone, not taking into account things like shipping, packaging and marketing... and also I think ignoring European taxes.
The Wii was already using chipsets that were not exactly new and revolutionary (Nintendo basically wanted a much smaller, cooler running version of the GameCube with a small (X2) increase in relative power..... so the chips will not have been possible to reduce the cost on as much as the CELL could.... reducing the cost on a totally new thing like the CELL happens quite quickly and with quite a lot of money taken off, so while the CELL may have gone from being $150 per chip at launch to maybe $20 now, the Wii chips were already less than that to begin with so there is not much scope to save money. ESPECIALLY when the Wii chips are still using 90nm process, while the PS3 and X360 have moved on to I think 45nm by now... which is much cheaper to manufacture, as well as being cooler to run so less need for expensive cooling (don't the new PS3s only have 2 fans compared to 4 in early models?)
All that means the Wii could not have had significant cost reduction put in pace from the launch models.... in fact with the exchange rate so poor I believe they are making less per console now than they did at launch.... you can see this with the profits being made, because the are making about double the profits per quarter now than they did nearer launch, yet they are selling double the number of Wiis, and many times the units of software.... so even if the profit per unit had remained the same they should have been making over double the profits they were back then.... surely if the costs had reduced so much like you seem to believe they should be making as much as the whole of Microsoft does by now.
Perhaps you just haven't done any maths?
at $50 pure profit per Wii, with 25 million Wiis sold in 1 year.... that comes to $1.25 billion.
The end of this Fiscal year looks like it will have pulled in about $3.5 billion..... Now take away DS profits, as well as Wii Software profits, all of which are almost certainly higher than Wii Hardware profit..... It sure doesn't make any sense for Wii hardware alone to be pulling in even $50 per system.
|
they don't make that much per unit, they wish they did though.
