reverie on 18 February 2007
stewacide said:
The Wii, in addition to being cheap to built, also was easy and cheap to develop since they started with all the work they'd already done with the GC, and did easy things like ramping up the clock and adding more memory.
Nintendo's R&D expenses almost doubled when they developed the Wii. They reported 31 billion Yen in R&D expenses for 2006 (fiscal year, ending 03'2006), up from 15-17 billion Yen per year from 2000 to 2004 and 21 billion Yen in 2005 (Source: nintendo.co.jp). So it's fair to say that Nintendo had to spend less in R&D for the GameCube. Probably their partners like ATI and IBM had to do less R&D for the Wii, but that motion sensing must have cost Nintendo 10 billion Yen of R&D alone.
Hardcore gaming is a bubble economy blown up by Microsoft's $7 $6 billion losses.
