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Forums - Nintendo - Is the Wii Overpriced?

bdbdbd on 23 March 2009

I would've never known that the articles title would suggest "is the Wii overpriced" without the bolded part in the beginning.

Anyway, that looked more like a standard SDF crap with all its mistakes.

Wii is priced in the same range as GC, with the difference that Wii comes in with forced bundle (in the west), when in Japan, the price is the same as GC.

"GC close to matching Wii on a technical level" and "essentially the same specifications" seems to be "relative" terms once again. If it's supposed to say "closer to GC than PS360", then yes, it's "close to matching". Also, Xbox isn't more powerful.

And if people are bitching and moaning about PS3:s price, people are doing the same about Wiis price - with the difference that most people have noticed how stupid it makes you look, when you try to build your argument based on a supply constrained product being too expensive. Some people should learn what "logic" means.
Vote with your wallet, if it's too expensive, don't buy it. Works with PS3.

It doesn't cost 250 to manufacture Wii, if it would, it would be very stupid to sell it at that price, it wouldn't generate profit that is needed for a company to stay alive.

Softwarewise, Wii is beyond Dreamcast, PS3 and 360, since Wii has more games released on it that each of the platforms in question.
Apparently people don't care about the video marketplace and wasn't there a rumour about Netflix possibly opening a service for Wii.

Wii doesn't play DVD:s because licensing a DVD playback would cost money in the form of royalties, that would cause declined profits. If royalties would be 5 per unit sold, at the moment Wii would have made about 250M less profit.

A harddrive is just grasping at straws. Wii has internal memory, which is the idea of HDD, if you'd want to debate about the size of the memory, i'd say that would be an argument, but to complain about a lack of HDD is just stupidity.

Now, the last chapter looked like an oxymoron in context of the whole article before it; first complaining it's too expensive and then wish for Nintendo to offer more and price it accordingly, since if Nintendo offers more and prices it accordingly, it's going to raise the price. Just look at what happened with Wii Sports being bundled with the hardware.

As for my opinion about the article: the author should learn something about economics. It would teach him for example that companies need money in order to work and that market is effective in deciding whether the product is too expensive or not. It doesn't work that way that you buy something (you don't have to buy) and then complain that it's too expensive.
Secondly, the guy misses the whole point that the consoles are only worth of their games libraries. The hardware itself has no value without the software for the platform.



Ei Kiinasti.

Eikä Japanisti.

Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.

 

Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.

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TWRoO on 23 March 2009
dahuman said:
TWRoO said:
Baggins said:
TWRoO said:
Clearly it isn't.

Price is not the sum of it's components... I have said this before. The price should be put at whatever point customers are willing to pay for. So the Wii is priced perfectly.

The DS is somewhere between N64 and Dreamcast graphically, should it be priced at $20?

The PSP is about as powerful as a PS2, should it have a price cut?

The PS2 is less powerful than the GameCube and Xbox were.... so why was it's price higher?

 

 Goes without saying, but I don't think that is what the OP was asking.

Price of the Wii has actually gone UP a couple of months ago in the UK...Of course they can sell it for what they like cos it's so popular etc. I'm quite sure everyone is aware of this! But we are being ripped off. ;)

Cost to produce it is so small, it's not like they are clawing back the costs of R&D like say IntelAMD where a chip might cost to a consumer around 50x the cost of production. Nintendo are just exploiting you all and you're all happy about it...Good for everyone I guess in a kinda retarded way. But I don't own a Wii, I don't think it's worth it :) I think a PS3 represents better value.

The PS3 has no value to anyone who doesn't want to play it's games.... value has nothing to do with how much it costs to produce.

The Wii was reported to be making $48 per unit in America, $70ish in Europe and was it $17 (I think?) at launch in Japan.
That was an estimate on parts alone, not taking into account things like shipping, packaging and marketing... and also I think ignoring European taxes.

The Wii was already using chipsets that were not exactly new and revolutionary (Nintendo basically wanted a much smaller, cooler running version of the GameCube with a small (X2) increase in relative power..... so the chips will not have been possible to reduce the cost on as much as the CELL could.... reducing the cost on a totally new thing like the CELL happens quite quickly and with quite a lot of money taken off, so while the CELL may have gone from being $150 per chip at launch to maybe $20 now, the Wii chips were already less than that to begin with so there is not much scope to save money. ESPECIALLY when the Wii chips are still using 90nm process, while the PS3 and X360 have moved on to I think 45nm by now... which is much cheaper to manufacture, as well as being cooler to run so less need for expensive cooling (don't the new PS3s only have 2 fans compared to 4 in early models?)

All that means the Wii could not have had significant cost reduction put in pace from the launch models.... in fact with the exchange rate so poor I believe they are making less per console now than they did at launch.... you can see this with the profits being made, because the are making about double the profits per quarter now than they did nearer launch, yet they are selling double the number of Wiis, and many times the units of software.... so even if the profit per unit had remained the same they should have been making over double the profits they were back then.... surely if the costs had  reduced so much like you seem to believe they should be making as much as the whole of Microsoft does by now.

Perhaps you just haven't done any maths?

at $50 pure profit per Wii, with 25 million Wiis sold in 1 year.... that comes to $1.25 billion.

The end of this Fiscal year looks like it will have pulled in about $3.5 billion..... Now take away DS profits, as well as Wii Software profits, all of which are almost certainly higher than Wii Hardware profit..... It sure doesn't make any sense for Wii hardware alone to be pulling in even $50 per system.

 

 

they don't make that much per unit, they wish they did though.

Exactly... in the overall scheme of things (evenly spreading out additional costs not associated with producing hardware and software, like distribution/marketing etc) they probably make less than $20 per Wii.

 



Lit09 on 23 March 2009
Avalach21 said:

I haven't read a single post in this thread, but this is the dumbest question ever.

 

No it's not overpriced.

 

For the past two years the Wii has been UNDER PRICED.

 

Anyone with even a miniscule education in economics understands that the equilibrium price is where market supply and demand are equal.

 

For the past two years, the supply has been unable to meet demand at it's current price, so the Wii is UNDER PRICED.

I pretty sure Nintendo knows that they have made a fortune selling the Wii at the price it is right now. If it's still selling like crazy, I see no point of them dropping the price even lower if it can't meet demand yet.

 



Mummelmann on 23 March 2009

To me it is, the price went up here lately and it costs around 2700 NOK now while I can get a 360 Elite for 2500 NOK and a PS3 for 3400 NOK and the Wii games cost more than PS360 games to buy (Ninty games were always expensive here).
I won't buy a Wii at the current price, when its been slashed by maybe 1000 NOK I'll consider it, one Wiimote and Nunchuck with Wii motion pluss will set me back around 1000 NOK alone so I won't be getting it till the controllers are cheaper as well. (4 player games? that'll be 3000 NOK in controllers thank you).



Procrastinato on 23 March 2009
RolStoppable said:
Procrastinato said:

I think of "slowing" as a derivative of growth of the industry.  Does that make my viewpoint clearer?  Last Year the Wii had momentum, in terms of marketshare, that looked as though it would eventually reach near %60.  Now it looks like it will never hit 50%, because its competition has increased at a larger pace, with regards to week-to-week marketshare.

Going by oyvoyvoyv's numbers (I think they are reliable) from another thread, the Wii is at 51.1 % in 2009 so far. For the whole of 2008 it was at 53.something %.

As I've already told you in another thread, the HD consoles had higher sales in the last few weeks because of numerous big releases and the Wii will exceed 50 % in weekly sales again soon.

I see... well, clearly you are right.  And I apologize for not taking your opinions in as my own, immediately upon seeing them. ;)  I hope you can forgive me, Rol!

 



 

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Orca_Azure on 23 March 2009

250 is fair in my opinion. It's just the right price for all it offers. Of course a price cut would always be smiled upon.



dahuman on 23 March 2009
Mummelmann said:
To me it is, the price went up here lately and it costs around 2700 NOK now while I can get a 360 Elite for 2500 NOK and a PS3 for 3400 NOK and the Wii games cost more than PS360 games to buy (Ninty games were always expensive here).
I won't buy a Wii at the current price, when its been slashed by maybe 1000 NOK I'll consider it, one Wiimote and Nunchuck with Wii motion pluss will set me back around 1000 NOK alone so I won't be getting it till the controllers are cheaper as well. (4 player games? that'll be 3000 NOK in controllers thank you).

 

awww dude I'm sorry to read that, that really sucks =X at least I now know to never move to Norway if there is ever a chance to.



arsenal009 on 23 March 2009

No it's not, that's one of the reasons it outsells the other consoles by a large margin.

The PS3 on the other hand is overpriced. That's why a very similar 360 sells more than it ;)



Lolcislaw on 23 March 2009

It is not Overpriced, why? because there is such high demand for it, if PS3 at 399 was selling like hotcakes no one would've called it overpriced.