Wii U Cost Of Manufacturing Detailed

[Joelcool7]

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.

I have to disagree internal memory is going to be a must what kind of memory is unclear but it will need some serious memory 120-gig likely at worst unless Nintendo releases two models.. Nintendo is putting a massive emphasis on its online system. We know full retail titles will be available online. We know that MMO's will probably be playable and that requires a massive amount of memory. We of course know downloadable titles will also be big. F2P games requiring tons of DLC.

All those features will require a ton of memory which mean at least 120-gig Nintendo will likely need additional memory I know it has been rumored that we will be able to use external hard drives. I suspect Nintendo has a hard drive.

As for it being cheaper then PS3 the cell processors in the PS3 are ridiculously expensive compared to power PC. The 3DS is also cheaper room manufacture. Guys manufacturing costs drop drastically within a year PS3 became profitable after three years even after receiving a price cut. I doubt if manufacturing cost is 180$ that Nintendo will charge 350$ last generation the 400$+ consoles did pretty poorly compared to Nintendo. After 3DS Nintendo knows it cant sell the console to expensive I fully expect a 299$ retail price if the manufacturing Turing cost is correct. I thought WiiU would cost 350-400$ and the manufacturing cost around 300+$. Their is no way Nintendo will risk a price cut again if the hardware is not powerful enough to justify a 350$ price tag Nintendo will likely suffer some sales issues!