Wii Motion Plus, 1 year later

[greenmedic88]

NiKKoM said:

Uhm doesn't that wikipedia link say:

MEMS gyroscope

Relatively inexpensive (less than US$10 per part as of 2009) vibrating structure gyroscopes using MEMS technology are available. These can be implemented as the tuning fork resonator, vibrating wheel or (planar) wine glass resonator.

A component that's $10 is expensive.. what would the price have been in 2006? $40? $30?

Safe to say it wasn't thousands of dollars and only available in housings the size of a aircraft nose cone. Or that this drastically changed over the span of 2 years.

But you raise a good point here. It may only be a production cost difference of even $10-20 to determine if a peripheral add-on is viable enough to sell at retail while still making a profit that makes it worth the manufacturer's effort.

$20 wasn't an unreasonable price for the dongle. But if it cost as much as the Wii Remote itself, Nintendo would have been better off just giving consumers an "all new" controller with Motion Plus built in at a slight premium instead.

The Wii Remote, which is more or less what made the Wii possible, had an estimated $10 worth of components upon debut according to iSupply.