I'm really kind of schocked at this bit of news, but Nintendo's senior managing director Yoshihiro Mori mentioned in a press conference on Wednesday that their latest console, the Wii U, will sell at a loss due to high manufacturing costs. I guess having Foxconn use unpaid, underage kids still couldn't drive the cost of manufacturing down, huh?
According to the Bloomberg report, Mori stated that...
“Manufacturing costs are expensive, and we priced the machine at a level customers would accept,” ...“It’s important for us to develop a healthy business next fiscal year by combining sales of hardware and software.”
This is baffling a lot of gamers because the Wii U will carry a $299.99 price tag for the 8GB unit and $349.99 price tag for the 32GB unit. The thing that baffles a lot of people are the specs. How could Nintendo be selling at a loss when a lot of the parts are dated? Heck, 8GB of memory space is child's play and you can pick up a USB stick for a couple of bucks with that amount of storage. The 2GB of RAM may be four times as much as current-gen consoles, but again, you can pick up RAM for under $20 at retail. For mass production it should only be a few bucks for Nintendo.
The Examiner notes that the loss is actually a combination of the Wii U's GamePad and the high market yield of the Yen. Now this makes sense. In this way, Nintendo is taking a loss not necessarily because the parts of manufacturing old tech is high, but because the dollar value has dropped and the Yen has gone up. Coupling this factor with the GamePad has put Nintendo in a spot where they'll actually end up selling the Wii U for less than what it cost to make. I guess we all have the well-performing Yen to blame for this...blast you Yen! Blast you!
So basically, not only is the Big 'N' selling a rather pricey console with some dated tech here and there at a high price, but they'll also be selling it at a loss. Interesting.
