The Wii U will be sold at a loss

[Chark]

Play4Fun said:

1. Like I said before, gamepads will only be sold seperately in Japan at for the moment. Nintendo believe  Japan will be willing to swallow the high price, the west will not, hence why it will not be sold seperately here for a while until it can be done so at a cheaper price.

 

2. Final example. kinect cost $50 to manufacture when it was released, yet was sold for $150 seperately. When bundled with the console it didn't add $150/$100 to the price.

Missed the part about Japan only, but I thought I saw a listing for the Euro pricing as well.

I never argued that it adds $150/$100, I argued it added $50, which aparently is just like Kinect. Either way, whether it is $50 or lower, it adds more cost to the console than a typical controller would. So despite anyone trying to argue what the system should cost according to its hardware specs, the controller adds more cost than it would "normally". Though if they are still taking a loss on the $350 model, there is a good chance replacing the gamepad for a standard controller wouldn't prevent the Wii U from selling at a loss. While the controller is more expensive, it isn't contributing crazy amounts to the overall cost of the system.

This shouldn't really even be an issue. The Wii U is essentially a one gamepad device. It has Wii Motes and the pro controller, it's fine. Besides running two gamepads has proven way too demanding. The trade offs to using two might not be worth the trouble in a good majority of games, or atleast ones that want to utilize graphical fidelity and complexity. Nintendo's reaction to the additional gamepad demand rumours was kind of knee-jerk. They should have just pushed their pro controller instead of instilling dev rumours about frame rate drops. People just need to realize that Wii U games (hopefully) can be played just fine without the gamepad at all.