greenmedic88 said:
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. |
Good points from both of you, I'd add this: Nintendo's huge order allowed the producer of the model it uses to immediately apply a more affordable price, being granted anyway the economies of scale, this would have been true even 2-3 years earlier , and even more, with hindsight, as it would have been fitted on every console (although back then not even Nintendo predicted Wii would have been so successful and fast-selling). As in 2009 Nintendo profited on a separated $20 dongle, including it in Wiimote in 2006 would have been affordable and Nintendo would have anyway kept an additional profit from those $50 it was able to add, thanks to the competition being insanely expensive, to the initially planned $199 Wii price. Anyway, as I wrote, it's a business decision, Nintendo surely knew the cons as well as the pros and accepted them.
