| Soundwave said: Pretty sure Nintendo is getting their carts at a fixed cost. If I'm selling pizzas and the pizza is $10 and you're saying I'll give you $5 for it, I'll say fuck you. But if you say I want 25 million pizzas for the next 12 months alone .... well ok. Sit down. Lets see what we can come to. Likely Nintendo is getting the cards for in the range of $1-$2 a pop. That is nothing like the N64 days where the cartridge itself cost sometimes $20-$30 on its own. If N64 cartridges cost $1 to mass produce and stored 170MB (1/3 a CD-ROM) as the starting point with increasing sizes as time went on ... I think the N64 actually could've won that generation with that setup because most third party games would've been portable and many developers would've jumped on board. |
Yes, all-in costs for the carts should be around $1 (a bit more on low-print games). The initial master mask is in the mid 5 figure range, the wafers from there are peanuts (literally pennies in raw material, and it's not actually a semiconductor, there are no switchable circuits on a mask rom) So for a run of 250,000 cards, the mask rom cost adds up to about 20 cents per. Add in plastic casing (another 10 cents or so all-in), labels (another 5 cents or so), game case/insert/manual (if any), another 50 cents or so. So about a $1 including the packaging. This doesn't take into account external things like development, marketing, art, etc.
The bottom line is that for titles that sell for $30-$60, the production cost vs disc games is marginal at best, and a total rounding error for big-time titles.
I personally think the Switch will be a sales disaster unless a whole lot of things go right that I won't repeat here, but it certainly won't be hurt by carts. I actually quite like the idea. Good solid tech, good price, convenient, and with improvements with data density and optical disc stagnation, it's actually more sensible than ever.
