Conegamer said:
The smaller stores won't get as much monies made out of it, obviously. I know that, when I bought my 3DS, I asked my local Gamestation how much it cost them to buy each 3DS (because it was more expensive to buy at Gamestation than other places), and they said it cost them £184 per unit, which they were selling for £210. Other stores had a lower margin (I believe the cheapest at launch was £189?), and obviously Gamestation bought more units, so they can buy cheaper. I know the margin wasn't as big for the Vita, but there you are. Even if only a few £ are made at retail, they still need to pay for, as I've said before, shipping costs, import fees, VAT etc., which takes a hefty chunk out... |
Shipping costs will be tiny as thousands at a time are sent in massive containers, they're very cheap. I don't think large businesses have to pay VAT to import their goods, they can reclaim it? or some other shit I don't understand. But that's what I heard, tell me if I got it wrong.
So it's what, £10 for the retailer, maybe £1 on shipping costs... I don't know about import fees, but I imagine it's also tiny seeing as Sony is a massive company and massive amounts of PS4s will be shipped in at once, they must get benefits for those.
Let's say it's £15 in total, that would still leave me at an RRP of £299.99, and it costs £300 to manufacture. £00.01 loss. And £325 manufacturing + what you've mentioned whilst being sold at £349.99. £24.99 profit! That's incredibly profitable for a console, the only cost that would need to be made up for is R&D, which would be relatively small as all the parts are just modified off the shelf parts.
They could easily lose up £40 on each console, over £50 would maybe be pushing it and over £75 would require really good game sales and a lot of subcriptions to services on the platform, it probably wouldn't be wise. But yeah, an up to £40 loss will be easily made up for.
