Wii U Apparently Still Being Sold At A Loss

[zumnupy10]

bonzobanana said:

zumnupy10 said:

Nintendo would be crazy really.

People need a reality check. The gamepad uses a naff resistive screen, cheap tiny capacity battery and a small pcb with no major components on. It's likely cost is $20 tops. You can get full tablets with capacitance screens, full logic boards with cpu/gpu/memory etc, incredibly more powerful and such tablets retail at $30-50. Plus they are made in smaller numbers. 

The reason the wii u costs Nintendo money is low sales. The amount of R&D, support costs, setting up the manufacturing line, halting the manufacturing line, marketing etc is not going to be paid back by the low sales rate. Having to re-package older stock to sell and having to deal with returns form retailers of unsold stock etc. 

It's hard to imagine the console and pad costs much to make and would probably be similar in cost to a hdd equipped 360 or PS3 however that said the wii u is often down in price below those consoles sometimes. In Europe the ps3 still easily outsells wii u and that is a market saturated with ps3s.

Let's not forget the wii u has lower spec memory than ps3 and 360 with only 12.6GB/s yes there is 4x as much though. 

The one thing that is costing Nintendo a lot in the wii u design is its slot loading drive. Remove this and perhaps replace with a top loading mechanism like ps3 and a lot of money will be saved. They could also bring back gamecube compatibility if they did this.

In cpu performance terms the wii u is much weaker than ps3 and 360. 

It seems whatever money Nintendo made on the wii they will end up losing on the wii u.

Nintendo made a lot of mistakes with the WiiU, but there is no way the gamepad costs anywhere near $100.