EricKei said:
Yatagarasean said:
Them being a milti-billion dollar company, they don't understand how fucked the economy is right now. Why would would they have sold the PS3 at $700 at launch? They don't fucking understand. Until they do, I hope NO ONE buys the Vita. I hope it's a commercial failure. Hopefully that would teach them not to be so fucking stupid.
The PS3 cost a ton at launch (the 360 wasn't exactly cheap either -- heck, neither were the NES nor the Atari 2600!), but even at $700 they were still losing a bunch on each unit.
The Wii, on the other hand, reportedly cost Ninty anywhere from $160 to $244 to make at launch, depending upon whom you ask. I do not recall anything suggesting that they lost money on it -- in fact, even breaking even on systems is a major anomoly for anyone *except* the Big N. Note that, regardless of actual manufacturing cost, retailers generally sell systems at their *own* cost -- When GS was charging $249 for Wii's, they were paying $249 for them.
one article suggesting the former -- feel free to research
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20061215092033.html
By god. how in the hell were Nintendo ever spending even $160 per Wii Unit when it is essentially an over-clocked Gamecube with an even cheaper off the shelf DVD-drive instead of a mini-DVD drive. Remember, the Wii is so similar to the gamecube it doesn't actually emulate Gamecube games, it just plays them! It's like what the iPhone 4 is to the iPhone 3, same tech with higher clock-rate. And they were selling Gamecube at $99 per unit from 2003, how much of a loss were they selling the gamecube for?!?!?
I suppose the motion-sensing might have cost some licencing, but not more than a couple of dollars per unit. How could Nintendo be making such basic tech for such a high price, IBM are ripping them off BLIND! Where the hell are Wii's manufactured? Wii has the graphical capability of a 2 year old smartphone only with none of the miniaturisation or integrated components (battery, multi-touch screen, etc), it should not be that expensive!
And on PS3, apparently $175-$200 of the cost of the PS3 was the Blu-ray drive. That turns out to be almost completely worthless for gaming, and before you get into any arguments, please show me the PC game that mandates a blu-ray drive? On PC where there are no limits on size, detail and scope of games? Games like Crysis and Witcher 2 both came on DVD no problem as long as you have a hard Drive install which is so common now on consoles.
But... Sony won the platform war against HD-DVD. If you can call it winning as blu-ray is hardly making DVD redundant. People didn't switch from VHS to DVD just because of the quality, it's the convenience of music-CD like compactness, no-rewinding and scene selection. The next step for movies is to digital-downloads and streaming of content, convenience like we have had for our music for so long.
As for SD cards -- an earlier poster had a good point. Not all memory cards are created equal. I paid $14 the other day for 8 gig SD and Micro SD's at a big box store -- I would never trust those particular chips for long term storage, but they're fine for system-to-system transfers, extra songs on MP3 players, etc. The good stuff DOES cost extra, it's just a question of whether the Vita use the good stuff, and whether or not these pricing "leaks"/rumors are even true. Keep in mind that they would likely catch MUCH more flak for endorsing crappy, failure-prone memory sticks than they would for endorsing/requiring expensive, high-quality sticks...None if us wants to drop that kind of money on a SD card...but I guarantee that people would be FAR more upset if their downloaded games and hard-earned saves suddenly vaporized due to shoddy chips IN the cards.
Edit: Of course, if they require/endorse expensive, crappy sticks, then all bets are off -_-
It's not just the cheap ones. Sometimes simply buying from no-name brands who make no guarantees yet save only a few pennies cost you so much more by being interminably slow or just refuse to work. In my experience price can be so independent of quality the most expensive stuff being so shoddy and the near-cheapest amazingly pulling ahead. There is no substitute to actual product reviews that perform rigorous real-world tests and comparisons.
As a rule the VERY cheapest things are crap until tested otherwise, they can do that for how many people just sort by price and automatically buy the cheapest thing but often within 15% of that price will be one of the fastest cards you'll need.
You just gotta find those review sites