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Play4Fun on 02 December 2011
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kitler53 said:
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.


The controllers are not going to cost a lot. The hardware inside is  less than a DS and they can sell those at a profit for $99

Nitnendo could probably sell them for $60 - $70 with profit.

A mic , speaker, 6.2" high resolution touchscreen, internal recharable battery. Nothing there seems like some new expensive technology that would be expensive to manufacture. Those are all mature tech.

The tablet itself has very little in terms of hardware, the console does all the heavy lifting, streams to the tablet and the it just accepts the feed and spits back control instructions. Plus the GPU uses eyefinity technology for streaming.