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VAMatt said:
Mar1217 said:

i don't think subjective calculus with arbitrary numbers make for a great compelling argument.

I agree that subjective calculus with arbitrary numbers ain't the greatest. But, were on a forum about sales where we deal with estimated or outright made up numbers all the time.  So, let's play it out a bit more anyway.....

$10m R&D
 2 million fancy boxes, at several dollars each, let's call it $5 each, so that's another $10m
Shipping from China to ports around the world, then shipping from ports to distribution centers, then shipping from distribution centers to stores has to be another $15or so per unit (they're not small), gives us another $30m.  That's $50m of baked in costs, by the time the thing is sitting on a retailer's shelf

Now, we have a larger box that takes up a lot of shelf space.  Retailers take smallish margins (typically 25%) on games because they're easy inventory to handle.  But, Labo is not a game in that way.  It takes up about 30 times the shelf/warehouse space.  It also isn't something that drives accessory sales.  So, the retailer has to get paid for that space.  My retail experience tells me they want a 40% margin.   That's $64m of the total revenue that went to retailers. 

So, we have $64m of retailer margin, $50m of costs to design, produce, package, and distribute.  That's a total of $114m, out of the $160m revenue.  That leaves $46mm for Nintendo.  The problem is though, we haven't yet accounted for any marketing other than packaging.  Nobody buys the thing without some advertising, and/or other marketing expense.  Millions more were spent there (though, arguably, they didn't spend enough in this area).  So, while my (admittedly, very rough) estimates lead me to believe that Labo has been profitable for Nintendo, they also lead me to believe that profit was not huge, and probably not large enough to justify a company taking its eye off of its core business.  

Sounds about right.  I doubt Nintendo lost money on Labo, but it didn't make enough money for them to push it much anymore or create many more kits (I believe there has only been one new one since its release.)

JRPGfan said:

I still think if you put in $10m and get back $100m+ in profits, thats huge.

You have to just be messing around, now, I'm guessing.  Nintendo isn't making anywhere near $100M in profits off of Labo.  If they had made that much money off of Labo in less than a year, you can bet they would be advertising it even more and putting out a new kit every couple of months.

LGBTDBZBBQ said:
I'm glad LABO performed badly in comparison to other core titles like Smash Ultimate, Zelda BOTW, MK8D, and SMO.
It's very clear the messages sent by the Switch users, they wanted more core titles on the switch. Stop wasting development and marketing budget resources on that experimental software and focusing more on the next 3d/2d Mario, 3d/2d Zelda, 3d/2d Metroid, big open world from Monolith, and etc.

They keep chasing that Wii dragon.  Looking for the casual market that has moved on to mobile.  The fact that they are portable and some of their games are more accessible/appealing to the casual crowd is really all they need to bring in some casual gamers.  I think instead of focusing on making Labo, they really should have been focusing on that Metroid game.  Cause, now, it seems it isn't hitting shelves until 2021 at the earliest.