Reggie was misquoted when he said Wii U profitable after one game

[Mr Khan]

Kasz216 said:

Mr Khan said:
My understanding was that the retailers paid for the games first anyway, which is why i never quite understood why publishers cared about sold vs shipped from a short-term financial standpoint. Longterm, i know it's important, as more sold means the retailers will buy more present and future games for their stock, but short-term per-unit Wii U profitability should depend on what retailers have bought, no?

My thoughts are that they're probably making a tiny per-unit profit if we factor software sales in.

Might depend honestly... at least some of their product likely has returnability.

I've yet to run a stock room for a electronics store... but for example in a convience store, beer, chips and hostess products... anything you don't sell you get credit for towards your next order.

In college books it's the same way.  You have 6 months to return the books for a full refund in terms of credit.

For example in this article guessing the price of a videogame they specficially mention the returning of games.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/

Finally, not all games sell, so the expense of returning unsold inventory eats up another $7.anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html

 

So my guess would be you can return at least some of your ordered stock.

I considered that possibility (knowing that that is how it worked with Comic Books before the late 1980s, where newsstands could just sell unsold copies back to the publishers), but then that would dis-incentivize stores from bargain-binning anything, if they could just dump it back on the publisher.