greenmedic88 said:
It will be interesting to see how this early report stacks up against the official iSuppli teardown and BoM estimate once they have a retail unit to analyze.
If correct, then it will have fallen in line with what I assumed would be the case. Nintendo won't sell a $399 console. Nintendo also won't take a loss on any hardware they sell (previously established). The Wii U controller would not be an excessively expensive component, in direct contrast to what quite a few naysayers claimed without even making an attempt to break down the cost of components that would go into such a controller. Probably because they were comparing the controller to a tablet PC, which the Wii U controller is most certainly not.
If I remember correctly, I said it would probably cost under $100 to manufacture, and that was on the conservative side, not even taking into account contract discounts with parts suppliers, bulk purchase rates, etc.
Plus, $299 seems to be the price at which the vast majority of consumers are willing to pay for the Wii U. Nintendo won't make the same mistake they made with the 3DS by overestimating consumer demand relative to what they would be willing to pay.
Based on the early reports, the bulk of the components from the CPU and GPU, no internal HDD, proprietary media format (no DVD or BD playback/licensing costs), etc. I was of the belief that NIntendo could pull off selling the Wii U for about $300 while still making a small profit on each unit sold. That's their proven speciality when it comes to hardware.
As for the 3DS, even at $169, the initial BoM was slightly over $100. I'm sure it's under $100 by now.
I suspect the reception to the Wii U at retail would be similar to that of the 3DS at $249 if Nintendo were to price it at $399.
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I doubt the 3DS costs have shrank at all this early, are they still using the original model? They are probably working on ways to reduce costs right now though and if they do redesign it all of the cost saving measures will be implemented then.
I'm going with my original thought last E3, that it would cost $350.
