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sundin13 on 22 April 2014
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fleischr said:
Dr.Henry_Killinger said:
Considering their network infrastructure and the fact that they would have to advertise even more then they are already are because their games wouldn't be in retail stores it would be a great cost to remove a blue-ray drive which would be pennies on the dollar.


Standalone Blu-ray drives similar to the Wii U's take roughtly about  $30 -$50 to manufacture if you do some back-of-envelope calculations.

If you remove that component from the finished product, it makes the Wii U cheaper to manufacture since there are fewer parts to hold inventory, fewer QA tests needed, and less labor to put the whole thing together.

You missed my point on download codes sold at retail. Just provide the customer with a gift card thingy and get the download code upon transaction taking place.

According to CNN's cost analysis of the Wii U, the optical drive costs around $17 whereas the Flash Storage costs $6 (for the 8GB version)...that $17 would likely easily be filled by more storage if the "digital only Wii U" had 500GB-1TB of storage.

fleischr said:

Retailers don't gripe at the fact they can't sell mobile and tablet apps directly. Instead, they focus the retail experience on hands-on trials. It works pretty well -- however because of the amount of space the current WiiU retail presence takes, they can't cede more floor space to this.

Selling a digital-only WiiU would be not much different from selling a Kindle Fire in terms of the bottom line per unit.

Yet, I don't typically see Video Game stores like Gamestop and EB Games selling the Kindle Fire or devoting shelf space to Apps...who is to say that they wouldn't give this "digital only Wii U" the same treatment if you think they are so similar.