Squilliam said:
Does that mean the people who claim the GC was profitable at $100 are the same? |
GC wasn't profitable at launch (I believe Viper said it was losing like $9 per unit)
GC however, was at the time more advanced tech than the Wii is now, so it's costs will have come down quicker... I have no idea whether GC hardware was profitable when it dropped to $100, I would suspect it was actually but the Wii is only based on the GC architecture, it is NOT just a GC inside that they modded to go a bit faster. One of Nintendo's aims making the Wii was to have the GPU and CPU as small and cool running (remembers 4 Jamaicans in a bobsled) as possible, so the chipsets will cost more to make and as they are less advanced in power terms, don't come down in price as fast. The Wii also has a lot of other things the GC did not have, like wireless and a mechanical slot loading drive, SD card slot... big hunks of plastic for the stands and things like the sensor bar... lots of things that are additional, but don't decrease much in cost.
To be honest I think they have probably cut costs on Wii hardware quite a bit... ie IF it was ~$195 to produce 1 unit at launch... it would probably be about $150 by now.... but the exchange rate has cocked everything up so much I think they get less per unit now than they did at launch in revenue (from overseas, which is most of the sales after all)
The Wii remote costs have probably come down a lot more (percentage wise) than the console has, because at launch the sensors in the remote were not produced in such huge numbers (I believe they are of similar tech to ones used in cars or something... do cars need them for the speedometers? I dunno, I guess not as all cars have speedos but I remember something about cars, so perhaps some off-road vehicles need them)
That is also an additional cost from the GameCube too, a Wii remote and nunchuck will cost a lot more to make than the GC controller.
