| maverick40 said: Apparantly, the Wii U controller will retail at approx $150. This is not a good sign profit margin of the console itself. Although you never know with Nintendo. http://kotaku.com/5942876/the-wii-us-controllers-are-really-expensive |
That $150 is probably including the typical extreme mark-up that is associated with accessories ...
IIRC wired controllers for the PS2 and Gamecube were (roughly) $25, with the Wavebird selling for $35, and console manufacturers were making a lot of profit off of these. In this generation controllers increased to costing $50 even though they were not substantially more complicated than the Wavebird. While I could be wrong, I suspect that the typical controller is now selling for 400% its manufacturing cost.
If I was guessing, I would expect the Wii U tablet would add $25 to the cost of the system above the cost of a conventional controller; certainly, a noticeable increase but it wouldn't be as dramatic as some people expect.
Ultimately, as I said in a different thread, Nintendo is a conservative company (read: cheap) and will not take the massive losses that Sony or Microsoft will but they're not incompetent; and if they could release the Wii U for a lower price and/or increase the processing power while retaining their current price they would. Hypothetically speaking, if Nintendo was willing to take the kind of losses that Sony and Microsoft were they could possibly increase processing power by 50%, if they were willing to release their system to be much larger while running hotter they could increase the processing power by another 50%, and if they were willing to sell it for $100 more they could increase processing power by another 50%; but the only way beyond that is producing a system with many negatives simply to get more processing power.
