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Wii U will be sold at a loss [Update: Confirmed]

Dat Gamepad and R&D. I wish they would have skipped out on the pad and gone with a souped up Wii-mote instead. Maybe the Wii U will produce something interesting down the road anyway. We shall see...
 
Nintendo you so cheap!
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wait wat?
 
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The world really is ending this year! Black is white, up is down, short is long, everything we know is wrong.
 
I'm modestly surprised, but only modestly.

If this is true, then it may help explain their exact strategy with the internal hardware of the console itself - because that much really did have to be balanced to offset the cost of the controller.

Also, it sure sounds like there was a fairly large amount of R&D going into the system as a whole to make the controller concept viable for gaming with no latency. Perhaps that is indeed contributing to this.
 
Someone build me a low-power-consumpion, low noise pc the size of the Wii U and capable of its output, then construct a tablet controller hybrid for it with screen latency lower than most HDTVs, put 8gb of flash on there and a heap of RAM, and try to fit nearly everything but the custom blu ray drive on a board this size..

wii-u-teardown-slide004_original.jpg


Now build me millions of them as quickly as you can.

It's like people can only think in off the shelf PC components.
 
The gamepad probably added a lot of cost, but the savings with the hardware lack-of power should have put it in profitability especially with their high price.
 
Is this thing confirmed? Also "The 3DS is failing"?

The "3DS is failing" is an opinion from someone external to Nintendo, one Bloomberg had to use for their iOS rulers of the world narrative, which is pretty clear reading the article.
 
Someone build me a low-power-consumpion, low noise pc the size of the Wii U and capable of its output, then construct a tablet controller hybrid for it with screen latency lower than most HDTVs, put 8gb of flash on there and a heap of RAM, and try to fit nearly everything but the custom blu ray drive on a board this size..

http://cdn.itproportal.com/photos/wii-u-teardown-slide004_original.jpg[IMG]

Now build me millions of them as quickly as you can.

It's like people can only think in off the shelf PC components.[/QUOTE]brb, consulting Foxconn
 
Surprised to hear this. Could only be a few dollars which would explain why Nintendo is looking to publish so many games during the launch window.

Japanese analysts says the 3DS is failing? Then PS Vita must be completely dead in Japan.
 
The Gamepad is more-or-less a tablet minus the chips. Adding an off-the-shelf ARM processor and some RAM costs very little, it's everything else that's expensive.
 
I am genuinely surprised at this, I hope they know what they're doing.

25 years of Mario and over 300 million first party games sold on its predecessor tells me they'll be juuuuuuuust fine.

That being said, this revelation is head scratch educing. The tablet really must have fairy dust inside to be so expensive.
 
If any there's anything positive to take out of this, maybe next gen (after Wii U/3DS), Nintendo will collapse their handheld and home consoles into a single device. That might be cool.
 
Someone build me a low-power-consumpion, low noise pc the size of the Wii U and capable of its output, then construct a tablet controller hybrid for it with screen latency lower than most HDTVs, put 8gb of flash on there and a heap of RAM, and try to fit nearly everything but the custom blu ray drive on a board this size..

http://cdn.itproportal.com/photos/wii-u-teardown-slide004_original.jpg[IMG]

Now build me millions of them as quickly as you can.

It's like people can only think in off the shelf PC components.[/QUOTE]

You can write the same BS about anything.
Off the shelf. haha
 
Serious if they were going to take a loss anyway, at least go all in with the GPU/CPU

I would have paid $399/$450 for a little more power. All this money when into the gamepad tech alone. smh
 
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