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Forums - Nintendo - CNN Money Wii U Parts Price Estimate

osed125 on 19 March 2013
Max King of the Wild said:
Why would Nintendo sell it for $90 at retail when getting one directly from them costs $150...

I meant $100 not $90.

Early profits most likely. Since Nintendo doesn't sell the Gamepad on retail the only way to get it is from them, so they are taking advantage of the situation. We also need to take in mind that controllers are usually sold a big profits, PS3, 360 and Wii controllers are very cheap to make but they sell it extremely high. It wouldn't made sense to Nintendo to follow this strategy since the Gamepad is so expensive, but there's a possibility.

The Gamepad cost ¥13,400 (aprox. $140), so given that everything is much more expensive there, a $100 retail price in the U.S is definitely not out of the question.



Nintendo and PC gamer

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twilight_link on 19 March 2013

WiiU is in public testing period, when HW became cheap enough and system software debugged, then they launch the system properly



fillet on 19 March 2013

I don't give any credibility to that $200+ figure.



Soundwave on 19 March 2013

The chip likely costs a lot because Nintendo insisted on a highly customized chip that could fit into a small casing and only draw about 33 watts. To get a chip to only consume that much power requires a lot of work and R&D and Nintendo is the one that paid for it.

If they weren't so obsessed with that niche need, they probably could've gotten a more off-the-shelf (but more powerful) chip from AMD for cheaper even.



VGKing on 19 March 2013

Interesting vid. The most interesting part is the that the Wii U RAM only costs $6....while the gamepad is like $79.
This brings into question Nintendo's priorities. Every single Wii U game will use the RAM but not every single Wii U game will use the Gamepad in a useful way.



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POE on 19 March 2013
MonstaMack said:

That's still pretty cheap. However I think the controller itself is a bit too expensive and is not worth the price.

I guess it depends on how much Nintendo spent in R&D and Marketing. Theres plenty of room for them to cut the system $50, but if they cut it $50 it has to make sense in long term parts costs and how many new games would be sold.

 


What??!!
If you are a Wii U user you can´t be saying those things about the gamepad. I mean, it´s simply amazing. The best controller ever



firelink on 20 March 2013
ninjablade said:
cbarroso09 said:
Wii U can be between PS4 and last gen but it is nothing to sneez about. It is a unique piece of tech, but not as hard to program as the Cell architecture.


it's really not though, far from it, it would need gpu with aleast 700-800 gflops, and and much better ram speed, atleast comparable to 720.


FLOPS aren't everything. Also, the RAM speed is not as low as people think (look up NotEnoughShader Wii-U Memory Story), and even if it was, Wii U has a large cache of eDRAM to use. And a third of the GPU is not even a known quantity. Not to mention CPU benchmarks put Expresso at comparable performance to Bobcat (predecessor to Jaguar, and the jump between the two is small, something like 10%-20%).

 

No one knows how the Wii U it fits between PS360 and the PS3. If it was as easy as reading the specs, Xbox would of blown the Gamecube away, and third party games would be running better on the PS3.

 

Also, Chipworks, the company who took pictures of the Latte die, said to add $60.