Wii U Apparently Still Being Sold At A Loss

[binary solo]

It should be an easy calculation to determine whether Wii U sales revenue > cost of production, distribution etc. All you need to do is amalgamate HW profit/loss for 2 financial years and see if you get a positive number or a negative number. I don;t think that detailed information is available publicly, but in theory it is not hard to figure out whether Wii U hardware is net positive or negative for Nintendo.

If Nintendo effectively manufactured 2 years supply of consoles in one year it is highly predictable that the first year will be a loss on hardware. If Sony or MS did the same they would be making ginormous losses in the manufacturing year.

That gamepad is a freakin' millstone around Nintendo's neck. For all that most Wii U owners love the game pad and how it works when it is well implemented in a game, integrating it into the Wii U seems to have proven to be as bad as auto-bundling of Kinect was for MS. Nintendo should decouple the game pad same as MS did with Kinect, and whack the Wii U price down to $199 right now.

There really are very few 3rd parties they will piss off with this because they have very low 3rd party support anyway. The game pad has a >9 million install base which means making games with game pad integration is not all that big of a risk, as long as its a good game. And if any company can make compelling games with game pad integration which convinces people to buy a game pad as a separate (profitable) peripheral it's Nintendo. The way I see it there is no down side to putting out a much cheaper gamepad-less Wii U sku.

But will Nintendo do it? History tells us Nintendo doesn't give a shit about what will help it in the market. They expect the market to come to Nitendo not the other way around. And so they will probably see the generation through to its conclusion without releasing a gamepad-less sku.

If Nintendo returns to loss making quarters in 2015 some very hard questions are going to be asked in the board room and shareholder meetings. And the 9th gen Nintendo console will come much sooner than people think.