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kitler53 on 02 December 2011
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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.

i don't even know what i'm still arguing as i really don't care but...

$55 for the record.

Wiimote with motion plus is already $40, with an extra $20 for the nunchuck.  with no doubt a healthy profit margin but from what i've seen your still missing:

A mic

A speaker

A 6.2" high resolution touchscreen

An internal recharable battery

and frankly there has just got to be somesort of a motherboard on this bugger.  To stream a the video to the controller the information has just got to be encrypted in some way to minimize the data transfer size and then unencrypted the the wiiU tablet. 

and i have a background in polymer processing and i promise you, the casing is deceivingly expensive.  ..or more directly, there is a roughly exponential cost vs. size curve and as this controller is pretty sizable compared to the wiimote or dualshock. 

anyhoo, i don't know what it will cost but it will obviously cost a lot more than the controllers we're accustom to.