In what may come as a shock to some, Nintendo’s confirmed that it’ll be selling Wii U at a loss when the console hits store shelves on November 18th.
Said Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo to investors:
Wii U hardware will have a negative impact on Nintendo’s profits early after the launch because rather than determining a price based on its manufacturing cost, we selected one that consumers would consider to be reasonable.
In this first half of the term before the launch of the Wii U, we were not able to make a profit on software for the system while we had to book a loss on the hardware, which is currently in production and will be sold below cost. Our loss has therefore widened during the second quarter in spite of bringing the Nintendo 3DS hardware back to profitability.
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It does come as a shock to me. So far, it hasn’t shown that it can do much better than God of War 3 or Uncharted 3 or even Gears of War 3, graphically, but at least it has more RAM. It’s early to call it a failure, but I don’t see how 300$ for the lowest tier model is “at a loss” for something not too innovative — the GamePad is a tablet stuck onto a controller, for example. Regardless, looking forward to my console when it launches. In Nintendo and Sony I trust.