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sundin13 on 22 April 2014
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fleischr said:
sundin13 said:

The gain from removing the disc drive would be overwritten by the need to increase the hard drive space (in fact, cost may actually increase)...You are proposing this idea for 200$ but that would just make Nintendo lose a ridiculous amount on each console.

All the questions in the OP are also valid concerns that make me think "why would this be a good idea?". You listed a few reasons (or rebuttals) as to why it isn't a bad idea but why is it a good idea? I can't think of anything

EDIT: I see you are talking about increasing gain from software sales...but that is sort of silly. The people who would buy this model are the same people who would buy digital anyways on a normal Wii U...its not like the Wii U doesn't offer digital sales of retail games already


The implicit goal here is to make digital the primary sales channel for games rather than a secondary one. Obviously, with a lower price, you can build a substantially larger userbase. If you can double the userbase, increase revenues 5-20% per game amongst the newly brought in userbase, that creates a far more favorable business model.

You can count on storage becoming cheaper, offsetting losses of manufactured units in the future.

Drop the cost of the Wii U $100 and lets call the optical drive and the storage even. Nintendo is already losing money on each Wii U sold, and now they are losing $100 more. About 20% of a game's cost goes to the retailer, the rest gets distributed around in ways that wouldn't change in digital vs retail. That means that whoever made the game is now making about 12$ more than before. That means 8.33 full price first party games must be sold for this exchange to work and the number increases with every discount or game made by third parties. That is a very high attach rate, and realistically that number would likely fall closer to 15 games/console sold in order to simply break even on this deal.

Your idea doesn't really work, because the optical drive is only worth 17$ and other costs are essentially negligible...The business model that Nintendo likes the most is the one where they make money on hardware, even if it doesn't sell the best. This model ensured that Nintendo made a profit even with the Gamecube which sold very poorly and I believe that it is a much better model than bleeding money on each console sold.

Additionally, we have not seen that consumers would be receptive to this idea. We saw a large backlash when rumors about the XBO being digital only and the PSP Go was a massive failure. Do you honestly think that something that consumers have repeatedly said they did not want would help in any way?

justiceiro said:
I just had an idea that nintendo will never do, but would be cool. Produce a 150$ gamepad that work stand alone, with a hdmi out port. All games would work on the cloud. You can play on gamepad alone or plug it on tv. Make a signature for it to cut the price donw to $50 maybe, and done. Of course, this would demand a enormous amount of server infrastructure.


The problem with this is the gamepad already costs over 70$ to manufacture and that is without all the components in the actual system that are needed for it to run. Throw in the rest of the components and you are losing a ton of money on that deal...

Dr.Henry_Killinger said:

Pennies on the Dollar when you include the increased advertising costs and the added load on the network infrastructure.


Exactly...that $17 does not get you anywhere, and with all those extra costs you are talking about, Nintendo would be bleeding even more moeny on this idea.