Atari once was. Many of the influential pinball and arcade games once were. Xbox products are already built in Mexico. Certain AMD and Intel products are built in the USA.
Console manufacturing today relies on machinery. The cost-savings of cheap labor is being outpaced by the cost-savings of mechanical labor. And what do machines need? Energy. Who got the cheapest energy? Not the USA, but we're getting there.
On the flip side, electronic manufacturers are diversifying their sources and pulling business out of China, including videogame companies. Granted, they are moving business to nearby places in Southern Asia.
Curious to hear if GAFers see any merit to this possibility. Also curious to hear what impact this might have on the videogame market in terms of pricing, reliability, and availability if this were to occur.
I don't think there is even the remotest possibility of it.
You also have to realize that people are only "sort of" moving production out of China - it's basically doing enough to ensure that the end product qualifies as being "made in <some country other than China>", but that's it. The reason comes down to the way electronics works - most products contain a huge number of parts, and a significant part of the cost is logistics - getting all those parts to the final assembly location. Due to the way that most electronics manufacturing is concentrated in southern China, the supply chains are typically very short, and as a result you don't have to carry much inventory. Moving the production away from the area means that you have to carry more WIP inventory because the delivery times are longer. Obviously, this costs money - CMs aren't charities, and any request you make of them that results in them incurring extra costs will end up with those costs being passed on to you (normally with a markup on top).
So, let's assume that someone like Foxconn or Flex is building a console - they are shipping it to multiple places around the world, including the US. Overall, the cheapest option in terms of the cost out of the door is to make it in China - but if you do that with product that's destined for the US it gets hit with a 25% tariff. The obvious solution is to keep all your existing supply chains in place, make the product that's going to anyplace BUT the US in China and also build up (generally SKD) parts kits that you can then ship to some place like Vietnam for final assembly so they don't count as "made in China" for import purposes.
Note that this still involves additional costs - the parts have to be delivered to China, then fed through IQC, kitted up, packed, shipped to Vietnam and then finally assembled - but as long as the incremental costs are less than the tariffs, it still makes sense to do this.
You could, in theory, move the entire production process to some place in SEA, but in practice nobody wants to do this because the support infrastructure simply isn't there. If one of your $750k SMT lines goes down then you want to get it back into production as soon as possible - if you are in Guangdong, then they will normally be able to get an engineer onsite in a couple of hours and resolve the problem - if you were someplace in rural Vietnam, then it would probably take at least a day to get someone on site and your production would be stalled for that period. This provides a strong incentive to only relocate the relatively low technology parts of the operation where there is less to go wrong.
For the specific issue of getting this sort of manufacturing back into the US, there is another problem - which is that in most cases the import duty on finished products shipped to the US is charged at a lower rate than the import duty on the parts in them, which always seemed insane to me and an active disincentive to US based manufacturing. Another (non electronics related) example of this is that there are now 25% tariffs on Chinese steel - so if you are making (I.E.) refrigerators in the US then you have to pay this extra 25% on one of your major cost drivers. But if you are a based in say Canada, you don't have to pay it - and the resulting refrigerator can then be exported to the US on a duty free basis, which once again provides an active disincentive to US based manufacturing.
Sorry for the wall of text...
launch PS4 is "MADE IN JAPAN"
