padib said:
If you asked me last gens, I would have said definitely no. It wasn't Nintendo's direction. As a matter of fact, they wanted to overprice the cube if it had less demand (wtf? that was Yamauchi, don't ask). Given the new direction very clearly outlined by Iwata, I really am not sure this time around. I almost get the sense Nintendo will only break even, make a very small profit, or maybe even sell at a loss for the very early start. Again, I'm only saying that this gen because the direction is aggressive (we saw the aggressivity of their approach in the 3DS launch lineup, nearly empty of Nintendo 1st party titles - to leave room for 3rd parties, this approach was never intentionally taken before, from what we know of past visions or management at Nintendo). |
You do realize that the Gamecube was reported to be sold at a modest loss at launch (rumoured to be around $20 per system), and the value demonstrated in the system has been suggested as the reason Microsoft decided to use IBM and ATi for their hardware this generation?
On top of that, while it sounds bizarre, Yamauchi's suggestion might not have been that bad ... In 2002 I was working as a security guard and one night my partner and I discussed videogames; he had access to all three systems because he lived with 3 roommates. One of his comments was that he was surprised by how great of a system the Gamecube was because he thought it would be crappy in comparison to the Xbox and PS2 because those systems cost $450 and the Gamecube was only $300 (Canadian dollars). Had Nintendo charged the same price and spent more money making the system look "high tech" a lot of people’s perceptions might have been changed.
To put it another way, if Panasonic came out with a tablet PC that was $250 how many people would assume that it had to be lacking compared to a $600 iPad? Could that unfair assumption hurt the system?
