Will Nintendo opt to lose money initially on the Wii U? Reggie says "NO" Update

[Mr Khan]

RolStoppable said:

kitler53 said:

i not saying that it will cost $100 but maybe upwards of.  i'm just making an estimate of costs, afterall if i'm high all that proves is that nintendo doesn't need to sell at a loss. 

..but i don't think i'm that far off.  nintendo is taking a small loss on 3DSs right?  well they both have touch screens (the wiiU's is bigger), they both have a recharable battery, a camera, a mic, a speaker, accelerameters, a gyroscope...   so it's short the CPU or whatever, a second screen, and the 3D camera.  if $270 is a loss on the 3DS then $100 for a wiiU controller doesn't seem that high to me for how many feature are tit-for-tat.

You are approaching this from the wrong angle. The most expensive components of the 3DS are obviously its motherboard and the 3D screen which both won't be a part of the Wii U controller.

Instead of estimating costs based on the 3DS, start with a regular controller. Today's controllers like the DualShock 3 are sold for about $50 with a good profit margin. The only additional components in the Wii U controller are a mic, a speaker and a touchscreen. The former two aren't especially expensive, so it would take one heck of a screen to push the price to $100.

The bigger problem is the Wii U itself. Since Nintendo is aiming for third party parity with that thing (parity with the Nextbox and PS4), $200 for the tech inside that box is lowballing it.

Technology advances rapidly, after all. Wii U can take advantage of much smaller die sizes as well as other advancements in tech since the beginning of the generation, so it's likely less for them to get something beefy under the hood without having to climb too rapidly, and still be comfortably ahead of PS360, and not so far behind the Sony Microsoft successor consoles that they'll be run out of the loop