TWRoO said:
Squilliam said:
vonboysp said:
Squilliam said:
Im confused here:
Some people claim that the GC never lost money @ $100
Other people claim the Wii cost more than $100
The Wii = shrunk GC hardware. |
if you'll go back to twroo's posts, you'll find the people claiming the wii only costs 100$ don't know what the hell they are taliing about.
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Does that mean the people who claim the GC was profitable at $100 are the same?
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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.
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Small and cool running = cheap, especially as they now use the ultra cheap 90nm process node which is used for commodity chips now. The I.P used for the Wii is practically worthless and they would hardly be paying any royalties to use the technology in the console itself. If you look at the equivelent in the chip business, its probably the G80 90nm -> G92 65nm -> 55nm -> 40nm and getting cheaper and faster at every step. Just because it doesn't come down in price, doesn't mean that the price isn't low to start with though the price of the Wii hardware over volume is still likely cheaper than the cost of the Gamecube even though the internals are faster, aside from the controllers. The economics for the 1st million produced looks different from the economics of the 50th million produced.
SD card slots are in everything, and cheap. The sensor bar is only a few leds and a wire behind some darkened plastic and the controllers cost far less now than they did 3 years ago. I can't say what the Wii actually costs to produce but in Yen equivelents it has to be cheaper than the Gamecube ever was because for the most part its a simplified Gamecube.
