NX not to be sold at a loss. Nintendoomed or Smart?

Uh-Oh?

So either overpriced and powerful, or underpriced and PS4 levels at best?

Does this spell doom for Nintendo?

Given that there are 40 million PS4's out there and 20 million Xbox One's I actually think it's smart on their part. They don't need to overpower the other consoles, just not be underpowered for 3rd parties to consider them.

PS4 Neo and Xbox 1.5 (if they are real) won't matter in the end because developers still need to produce games for the lowest common denominator (PS4/XB1).

Not selling at a loss is why Nintendo is still in business today.

I think that was a smart move.

I just think it gives them an opportunity to competitively price the system and still give 3rd parties a powerful enough system that can reach XB1 and PS4 levels of performance.

I don't get the hype on performance and third parties. Those two elements aren't helping the xbox one do better in the market.

Since its Wii U remake it would mean that price would be about 400 dollars = 400 euros

Agreed, but I think it needs to have those games to be able to be successful in the eyes of the gaming world. I enjoyed the Wii U. It gave me my money's worth and I would buy it again at launch.

People begging for Nintendo to go 3rd party are delusional because they aren't hemorrhaging money like other companies.

Thats what keeps specs down on all consoles. People have shown to not want $600 consoles.

Why would they sell at a loss? If they don't hit their software sales marks the company loses money. It's too big of a risk, especially coming after such a disaster.

Nobody should sell their product at a loss. That should not be some standard we hold the game companies too. Selling at a loss guarantees longer generations for the companies to make back their money. This stagnates game development as developers are forced to built games to fit within the limitations of extremely dated hardware. Already the PS4/Xbox One are limiting games, would you want these restrictions to last until 2020 or beyond?

Their margin on the original 3DS was almost triple the manufacturing cost. You think selling at a lost ever came across their mind? lol

Uh, you do realize that Xbone and PS4 weren't sold at a loss, right? NEO most likely won't be either. What a stupid thread based on wild, uninformed assumptions.

Yep another underpowered console, because there is no way they are selling the NX at $399.99.

A $299.99 console without any kind of loss will be weak sauce. Probably somewhere between the XB1 and PS4. Not gonna be anywhere close to the Neo, or possible XB1.5. What a joke. Welcome to 2013 Nintendo.

@techhog89: what a shit post from someone who doesn't have reading comprehension.

Clearly I wasn't attacking Nintendo and asking for people's thoughts on the possibility of underpowered or powerful Nintendo consoles, but clearly you don't know how to read.

Nintendo sold the Gamecube for $100 less than the competition and still made a profit. That system was fairly evenly matched with the XBox and PS2, both of which were selling at a loss. I don't know if they will pull that off with the NX, but it's possible.

I don't think any console was sold at a loss this generation.

That's why the PS4 and Xbone weren't powerful at launch, and are getting revisions. I assume the NX will fall into the same boat.

Actually, I remember reading somewhere that Nintendo did in fact take a small loss initially on the gamecube.

"Japanese stock newspaper, Kabushiki Shimbun, ran an article regarding Nintendo and the game industry on their web column "Analyst Kabuka Shindan" recently. The article revealed that the new memory media which will be used in DS software can cost 30-70% less than the current GBA cartridges. It was also noted that Nintendo are currently losing 20 billion yen each year on Nintendo hardware, but that this loss will be reduced by reusing the production plants for the next generation of hardware. A closing comment was made that if Nintendo could reach an operating profit of 150 billion yen for the year, the stock price could well rise to 20000 yen (it is currently around the 12500 mark).

Source: Kabushiki Shimbun (via Quiter) "

@sHaDyCuBe321: What has been said here isn't enough information to make any sort of guess on performance or price, let alone to narrow it down to two possibilities.

Well, this mean we will have another under power Nintendo console that base on some type of gimmick since they said they do not want to show it so other company can't copy it. Good buy Nintendo! you will not earn a dime from this this time around!

Being not sold at a loss could mean either it will be expense and powerful, or it will be reasonable just like when the PS4 released with modest power.

I wouldnt be surprised if most consoles over the years have been sold at a loss in the begining. It probably becomes cheaper over time and then they will male money later.

Selling at a small loss is a good idea because what matters is how many consoles you sell because the more consoles you have out there then the more people you will have buying games. The real money is in the games . People are only gonna buy one console who cares if you lose 50 on the console you will make it back in game sales.

A $299.99 console not sold at a loss won't be more powerful than the PS4, even for a March 2017 release.

Seriously, how much profit do you think Sony makes on every PS4 sold at a $349.99 price point?

I think Nintendo realizes that a Nintendo console can't be sold higher than $299.99. People don't want to pay higher than that just for the privilege of being able to play Nintendo games.

@emgesp: Good point... assuming that PS4 is still $350 by end of the year. I also take it that you expect the NEO to cost $500+?

$300 is also an assumption.

The gamecube wasn't sold at a loss either.

I'm expecting the NEO to be priced at $399.99 and for Sony to aim to break even. The OG PS4 will most likely drop down to $299.99 later this year and I'm sure Sony will still make a profit at that price. I'm expecting the NX to be about as powerful as the OG PS4, but consume less power as they will use a more modern and efficient architecture.

Remember, Neo is mainly reusing a lot of the same internals as the OG PS4, but with a few enhancements.

When Nintendo dropped the GC's price down to $99 they did.

"Japanese stock newspaper, Kabushiki Shimbun, ran an article regarding Nintendo and the game industry on their web column "Analyst Kabuka Shindan" recently. The article revealed that the new memory media which will be used in DS software can cost 30-70% less than the current GBA cartridges. It was also noted that Nintendo are currently losing 20 billion yen each year on Nintendo hardware, but that this loss will be reduced by reusing the production plants for the next generation of hardware. A closing comment was made that if Nintendo could reach an operating profit of 150 billion yen for the year, the stock price could well rise to 20000 yen (it is currently around the 12500 mark).

Source: Kabushiki Shimbun (via Quiter) "

@emgesp: Ah, I thought that you were saying that NX would have to be weaker at that price. Okay. Slightly more powerful is what I'd expect.

Well it will be a good deal weaker than both the Neo and XB1.5 for sure. I'd say best case scenario for the NX at a $299.99 price point while also factoring in Nintendo's obsession with low power consumption is to expect OG PS4 in terms of performance.

Now, if Nintendo doesn't mind cranking up the TDP it could very well be a slight improvement over the OG PS4, but I'm not counting on that.

Nintendo isn't out for the gamers unlike Sony, bad move.

Smart, but please have good 3rd party support.

@emgesp: Are you not expecting Polaris in the NX? If so, obviously the TDP will be lower. Even NEO will have a lower TDP than a launch PS4 most likely. Knowing Nintendo, they're just going to aim for a budget and max TDP, make that TDP the priority, and work from there. It'll most likely use an ARM CPU, so that frees up some of the power budget. There are also rumors of there not being an optical and using game cards instead, which reduces both cost and power. I'd say that they could manage 10-20% faster than PS4 within 60W.

I don't think that we should completely rule out $350 though. Just because you have ruled out third-party support completely, it doesn't mean that they have (and honestly, if they have they should be aiming for a $150 price because power would have no benefit to them compared to price).

You don't think before you hit post do you? Otherwise I'm sure you'd make some sense.

We don't know the specs and price so hard to make a judgement with those critical pieces of information

I do believe they will use Polaris, but they will most likely utilize the power efficiency gains over performance.

Wii U only consumes around 30 - 35 watts, and I don't see the NX consuming more than that if Nintendo plans to keep the form factor around the same size as the Wii U. Now, is it possible Nintendo makes the NX a bigger box that consumers more power, sure, but I personally don't see that happening.

I think for the NX to gain traction right out of the gate the price needs to be at around $299.99 tops. They need to aim this console as the best secondary system, because lets face it for the majority of gamers a Nintendo console is not going to be worthy of being their primary console.

Nintendo could cut costs by not including a hard drive.

@emgesp: They would need to disable like half the GPU to get power consumption that low, even with Polaris. It would be noticeably weaker than XB1. Unless they're aiming for under $250, I don't see that happening, especially if the CPU power leak is accurate (and it would be a first for that leaker if not). That would also mean paying for a ton of wasted die space or a custom GPU. Nintendo likes power efficiency, but if they were willing to pay extra for it Wii U would have been 28nm so they could have matched Wii's power consumption. So, I highly doubt that they'll go the extra mile just to get power consumption that low, and if they do want it that low it'll be 28nm and closer to Wii U than Xbox One.

Additionally, one of the points brought up by Kimishima when talking about making a profit was leveraging the weak yen to their advantage, which means that the profit is unlikely to be super high and/or the primary target of this hardware is not Japan. We shouldn't just assume that Nintendo learned nothing from Wii U at all besides "$350 is bad." That's a safe assumption, but it could be very wrong.

Sweet! Wii U part 2! Nintendo will soon have 2009 level hardware in millions of homes for a one time low price of $249! Thank you Nintendo for pushing the boundaries of modern technology...erm.

Wanting to make a profit on the hardware is only sensible. But if it launches at a cheap price that'll severely limit it's power. They aren't going to stay a gen behind again... are they?

Define "a gen behind." If you mean "weaker than PS4/XB1," then it probably won't be. If you mean "weaker than PS4 NEO by a lot," then it probably will be. If you mean "weaker than 9th-gen consoles (PS5 etc)," I don't know why you'd expect it to match them in the first place.

Also, I want to note that I was slightly off about something: PS4 was taking a very small loss per unit at launch. However, that loss turned to profit by May 2014, just six months later. So, I don't think we have enough context to say that it'll be underpowered. We need to know either the price or the gimmick first.

I would be very surprised if the NX consumed more than 45 watts. It's just not very Nintendo like. You also have to take into account that Iwata was heavily involved in the development of the NX, so we can't assume Nintendo made significant changes to the NX's design since his passing. All the specs were probably already set in stone while he was still alive.

Smart move.

And then 3DS and Wii U were both sold at a loss for roughly two years. Why would selling NX at a loss not come to their mind?

Right, I remember when PS4 or Xbox One were sold at a loss.

They weren't.

Nothing so far indicates that it will be cheap- nor does being cheap indicate that it will be limited in terms of power. See also: Gamecube.

You should try to not talk too much.

We've been here before.

Or a disc drive.

IT would be extremely hard to hit such a low target. You're also completely ignoring the part I mentioned about it potentially not having an optical drive, which means more TDP headroom in the same space. It's size that Iwata was concerned about with Wii and Wii U; the power consumption was a consequence of that size. My 60W estimate would also still be extremely low and "Nintendo like" imo. I'm sure that if we were having this conversation about Wii U based on Wii, you would have looked at Wii's sub-20W power consumption and said that there was no way that Wii U would use more than 25W. Now, look at this:

See how much space the ODD takes up? a 2.5" HDD would take up less than half of that, so you could pretty much double the size of the heatsink and still have an HDD and game card slot. The ODD likely uses more power than an HDD too, so I'd say that it would only need something along the lines of 55W in the end. Does that sound insane to you? The Wii U's power adapter is 75W, so they wouldn't even need to use a much bigger one.

That has nothing to do with Nintendo selling Gamecube at a lost. They are just talking about Nintendo recovering from R&D. Wii U was never sold at a lost, but it took awhile to cover the cost of R&D.

But if you want to count R&D, then no consoles are sold at profit at first and make profit later in the consoles life.

By a gen behind, I mean the NX being a PS4, with 2013 specs, in 2017. When the Xbone and PS4 will have "Elite" versions that are better again. And possibly PS5 and XboxNew on the way.

If they make the weakest console again, they're going to be left behind again. Why is it unreasonable to expect NIntendo's 9th gen system stand up the other folks 9th gen systems, btw?

At the very least the cpu will be better in NX compared to Ps4 Neo, and it will have more memory. The gpu being better/on par with Neo is questionable though.

All their consoles have been cheap. The WiiU is actually the dearest they've ever made, and that still wasn't exactly a bank buster at 300 for the base one. A cheap price is welcome of course, but not at the cost of power.

The Gamecube was very impressive power for that price but I'm not if that's as applicable today. Console architecture design has basically just merged with PC at this point. I'm not sure if there's any "hidden powah!" that can be unlocked, rather than just a pretty simple price to power ratio.

Then it'll be a gen behind. Sorry. (Though it''s not like that'll effect third-party support so I don't know why it matters.) They would need a $400-450 console to match or beat the NEO, and that's not going to happen. And it's unreasonable because how are you going to expect an early 2017 console (that was delayed internally from holiday 2016) to match a late 2019 console? Those "Elite" versions are not what I mean by Gen 9. It's actually extremely laughable that so many of you think that they're a generational leap, and it's going to result in a ton of disappointment when they're revealed and you see that the jump isn't that big at all.