Gamecube was an engineering marvel and it was still profitable at 99$... PlayStation 2 was priced at 300$... Imagine if Nintendo went all out with Gamecube and even sell it at a loss back then. They could have made a 60 watt beast that could dish out 40 GFLOPS... o_O

Nintendo could really pull that off... If they did and if they integrated DVD and broadband back then... It would have completely destroy the competition but hey if Nintendo knew back then what would happen with Gamecube then they would have gone all out. But we cant complain... It is what it is...

We all can speculate... What if that or that...

More bundurus.

I'm pretty sure the Cube was $200 or 250 when it launched. They removed 480p support to get the price down in the later models. The gamecube did have a modem. The only game I can think of that used it was Phantasy Star Online though. There was a limited edition Gamecube made by Panasonic that played DVDs.

Ah, the old panasonic q, looked like they duct-taped a small, portable dvd player on top of a gamecube and slapped a faceplate on it, yet it somehow doubled the gamecube's cost. If nintendo weren't cheap from the onset and paid the license fee for dvd playback they could have found a way to develop the system around it and keep the gamecube relatively small and cheaper as compared to the competition. Not that it matters at this point of course.

I don't see any physical hardware changes coming. Perhaps if the Wii U had been more successful they would do so to expand the market further.

I think as soon as Nintendo can they will replace the gamepad with something smaller which is both better for games and cheaper for Nintendo to manufacture.

However I don't know how much stock is still about of the existing wii u. I'm sure at this point they are probably just manufacturing to meet demand however they stopped making the 8GB model a long time ago yet you still see stock about of that model. Some of the special editions seem to have old stock wii u consoles and have simply been re-packaged to make them fresh again for retail. This makes me think Nintendo are sitting on a lot of stock reserves for wii u. Maybe enough to last this year out.

This is probably the dilemma for Nintendo. However a common tactic is to announce a new model perhaps a 128GB wii u with a revised gamepad and then use that as the basis for dropping the price of the original wii u to clear stocks.

I suspect the wii u isn't currently being manufactured and when it starts again it will be a new product sku with a smaller gamepad.

@novasonic

I know that Gamecube had a broadbans adapter, I was saying that it should have had built in broadband and Panasonic Q is a frankenstein and cost 100$ more than PlayStation 2. Gamecubes launch price was 200$ and if it had a custom DVD reader and broadband built in then Gamecube would have been priced at 300$... Problem with Nintendo back then is that they always aimed for 200$ price point without loses... They could have ideally made a Gamecube with custom DVD reader and broadband built in and then put a beffier GPU and more RAM and it would have reached 400$ and they could have sold it for 300$ to match PlayStation 2.

Gamecube could have been all around perfection... It is funny that Dreamcast was as powerful as PlayStation 2 yet bandwidth and memory bottlenecks were pain for 3rd parties that if they were lucky could have 1 million polygons while Segas own teams reached 3 million polygons per second yet Dreamcast was capable of 7 million polygons per second. I am sick when I see how Nintendo always aimed at 200$ without loss per unit of lets say 50$... Yes it is nice for consumer that a console is cheap and affordable for them and thqt they dont lose their money yet I think Nintendo knew back then but was afraid of risk. Finally with Wii U they are actually tqking some real risk like they did with NES... Yet people nowadays are just plain dummies... They dont want good games or replay value of have fun anymore... Real gaming experience... I guess that they would have hated PlayStation 1...

RAM is one thing the Gamecube needed more of. It seems to be what scared off a bunch of 3rd parties. I think the GPU was fine though. It didn't have some of the clever texture tricks that the Xbox had, but it could produce more polygons on screen at a time than it. And those load times.. My only mistake was making the Gamecube my first disc based system. Its load times were burnt into my head as what the standard should be, and now I'm doomed to be disapointed by every other consoles load times for the rest of eternity.

I don't think any important physical hardware changes will happen anytime soon, but a Mario Kart 8 bunduru will happen!

hmmm I'm going BOLD and say it will be smaller, cheaper and with colors. Don't rage at me plox