I guess there won't be any price cuts this year then.

I actually don't think so. And I don't think they will even try to compete with MS/Sony. Using the same ARM CPU across the board will save them big time in costs and R&D and will scale down in cost extremely quickly. It will also allow for very easy multi-plat home and portable versions of the same game. 

Man, Nintendo's made a lot of dumb mistakes, but I think making a system with such an expensive controller really takes the cake. It's pretty much screwed the entire generation for them. Without it they could be selling tons of units for dirt cheap and still making a profit.

It should be an easy calculation to determine whether Wii U sales revenue > cost of production, distribution etc. All you need to do is amalgamate HW profit/loss for 2 financial years and see if you get a positive number or a negative number. I don;t think that detailed information is available publicly, but in theory it is not hard to figure out whether Wii U hardware is net positive or negative for Nintendo.

If Nintendo effectively manufactured 2 years supply of consoles in one year it is highly predictable that the first year will be a loss on hardware. If Sony or MS did the same they would be making ginormous losses in the manufacturing year.

That gamepad is a freakin' millstone around Nintendo's neck. For all that most Wii U owners love the game pad and how it works when it is well implemented in a game, integrating it into the Wii U seems to have proven to be as bad as auto-bundling of Kinect was for MS. Nintendo should decouple the game pad same as MS did with Kinect, and whack the Wii U price down to $199 right now.

There really are very few 3rd parties they will piss off with this because they have very low 3rd party support anyway. The game pad has a >9 million install base which means making games with game pad integration is not all that big of a risk, as long as its a good game. And if any company can make compelling games with game pad integration which convinces people to buy a game pad as a separate (profitable) peripheral it's Nintendo. The way I see it there is no down side to putting out a much cheaper gamepad-less Wii U sku.

But will Nintendo do it? History tells us Nintendo doesn't give a shit about what will help it in the market. They expect the market to come to Nitendo not the other way around. And so they will probably see the generation through to its conclusion without releasing a gamepad-less sku.

If Nintendo returns to loss making quarters in 2015 some very hard questions are going to be asked in the board room and shareholder meetings. And the 9th gen Nintendo console will come much sooner than people think.

Wii U should be all profit now

Good point. My only concern is that they won't get a lot of third party support because of a different architecture like this generation (PowerPC instead of x86).

Technically it was for this fiscal year (until now it seems). But that's only because they manufactured all the Wii Us sold this fiscal year through about December the previous year. But that doesn't actually mean manufacturing a new system doesn't incur a loss. These are two seperate things. 

Well I guess the whole point of switching to a unified platform structure (similar to iPhone-iPad as Iwata has cited) is that Nintendo could basically just focus all their resources on effectively one platform instead of being split into 2. In said scenario, third party support isn't as important as there would be more Nintendo software to cover gaps. 

They probably still will get some third party support though, specifically from Japanese devs that currently support the 3DS and the good news is those types of games you could now enjoy at home too (ala Monster Hunter 5, Yokai Watch 3, Final Fantasy Explorers, Bravely Default, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest XI?, etc.), so if you're a home-only Nintendo player, that's a win for you. 

Fair enough

All this refers to is that the manufacturing costs haven't been set for this year-- likely due to Nintendo still selling off the batch produced last year. Last year, was a record low production year and the units still remained profitable. If 2015 actually happens to be a peak year, the costs of production should actually decrease with volume.

Perhaps the report is alluding to the liklihood of a pricecut on the hardware?