My brother just bought me a used DSL for $45. It's not that hard to find one for as cheap as that. Plus I would have bought one if it cost $250. It has one of the best game library's ever.
| HappySqurriel said: When people say that most consoles have been sold at a loss, it is true but they don’t seem to know or acknowledge the nature of that loss; and how drastically different it has become in the past handful of years. Traditionally speaking, most manufacturers (including Nintendo) have taken a loss on their hardware around the time of a system’s launch because producing a console for below $200 has always been a challenge; and that was the price most manufacturers were aiming for. Often the loss that the company was taking would be "recovered" when they sold a system because the margins on games and controllers were large enough that accessorizing your console easily covered the loss on the hardware. Even the heavily hyped PS2, which was supposed to be costing Sony a small fortune at launch, realistically was probably only costing Sony about $100 per console sold for the first 6 to 12 months of production; and after that, the PS2 probably spent most of its life selling at a profit. The console which is (probably) the most responsible for changing the dynamic of hardware releases is the XBox; because Microsoft choose a scaled down PC for hardware because of their limited R&D time, their inexperience in console manufacturing left them with very poor contracts for cost reductions, and they choose hardware (mainly the hard-drive) which don’t really reduce in price over-time. Microsoft bled $5 billion on the XBox 360 which was (in a large part) from excessive hardware losses and marketing costs. The PS3, PSP and XBox 360 are (probably) the only console’s ever released by an experienced console manufacturer which have maintained hardware losses much beyond the first year of a console’s life. This is probably acceptable if you are a massive multinational corporation who brings in billions of dollars of recurring revenue from other sources of income, but for most companies this is a strategy for being pushed out of the market.
|
I kind of disagree on three points somewhat.
1. I would say the reason why the Nintendo consoles would lose money for the early console units is that there are a lot of fixed costs with releasing a console and the variable costs fall rapidly as the production moves from the hundreds of thousands to the millions and onto the tens of millions.
2. I would say the console which most changed the dynamic was the Gamecube. It was both powerful and cheap, it had a pretty much ready made processor whilst they focused more on using a custom graphics architecture and Microsoft has followed this model pretty closely with the Xbox 360 and to a lesser extent you could argue that the Cell processor is more a model of a custom graphics processor than an a unique CPU as its model seems to be more similar to a GPU than a conventional CPU and the extra performance is simply used to make a prettier picture.
3. I would say the reason why the PS3 and Xbox 360 are losing money beyond their 1st year is because they were competing with each other on a similar loss leading strategy. When the market is adapting to a new paradigm and there are two manufacturers competiting tooth and nail for the old one losses are to be expected. In a way this is why the DS is relatively expensive compared to the cost of production as the DS does not really have a direct competitor in games. The PSP barely makes a dent in the overall software market now and I believe its more due to people buying it for its media capabilities on the move than its gaming capabilities.
Tease.
MaxwellGT2000 said:
It was when it first launched, it started to make a nice profit about a year later. |
Show me some proof.
Yes it is annoying...DsI cost 199 here...
Take my love, take my land..
very simple: it sells like crazy and Nintendo would be stupid if they charged only 99$ for it!
If you don't think it's worth the asking price then don't buy it or buy one second hand. Expecting a hardware manufacturer to drop the price of product that's selling as well as the DS is just crazy.
One question, when did the Gamecube hit $99 in the USA? How about the PS2? Was the PS2's hardware really that much more expensive to manufacture than the Gamecube's?
Three words: Supply and Demand
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