i was trying to make the point that they sell expensive memory cards (that only they can produce and sell) to offset the cheap selling price of the vita console.
@Foxi4 and advertisement. dont forget advertisement. (which is probably the next expensive thing besides pure hardware costs) and storage.
also, considering how sony made about 2 billion $ losses this year that they blame on videogames (with all the other stuff they do its 6 billion) you could be pretty sure they did make a loss with the vita somewhere.
Damn those evil Sony bastards trying to actually make money! I mean the whole point of devoting an entire section of your company to producing video games, hardware and consoles is to provide quality entertainment out of the goodness of their own hearts, right?
/s
when nintendo was not selling its handheld at a loss, it was seen way to expensive. specially in retrospective. but nintendo did not reduce its price by taking away one of its screens to sell them separately.
i was trying to make the point that they sell expensive memory cards (that only they can produce and sell) to offset the cheap selling price of the vita console.
So, all-in-all, they're being fair?
Nintendo overpriced their handheld by about $90, Sony's selling theirs at a loss, making up the balance with memory cards and Sony's somehow the bad guys here? Again, okay.
ok, they reap the rewards of announcing a cheap price (forcing competition to move away from making a profit from hardware as they always did in the past, even though it ended up giving the 3ds a considerable advantage due to highly increased sales; also, the pricedrop was generally percieved to be a pretty negative step, was it not? it even angered the core fan basis of nintendo supporters and early adopters)
and also making the vita look like a too good to be true deal (which it ended up being kinda), then, long time after that, shortly before the release, they basically raised the price again, without actually having to raise the pricetag. and thats what i criticize personally. i would've been ok with them adding the memory card (at least the mandatory but really not big enough one for starters) for free or by raising the total price tag. show how much it will cost you to play at the preorder price already.
its not like the memory cards were a last minute idea or anything
i'm happy that new electronics are cheap too, really. but i also sometimes miss the time when you paid what something was worth (+profitmargin). i get the feeling that, subsidizing prizes on consoles, or being allowed to put a 1$/€ pricetag on the newest smartphone (+contract), or reducing assembly costs so far that buying electronics ends up being somewhat of a morally objectionable thing... it really distorts a lot.
it changed consumers mentality to a point where what is perceived as adequate pricing is not actually correlated to production costs but to what one paid the last time. it was cheap at one point, it should be cheap always. yeah, thats not how everyone thinks, but it seems to be close from what you read in the comments section of dozens of websites.
its just that pure hardware costs dont make the final pricetag, which is why its crazy to say that the 3ds was sold 90 bucks above its worth. if anything, it was sold 90$ above its hardware costs. it was sold at a profit, yes. after paying for development, advertisement, shipping, software, storage, they made an undefinable amount of profit with the launchprice. but really, thats the way things should be, should they not? its kind of a basic principle of our market system. you invest X dollars and in return, you get X+Y dollars back.
god knows how many companies might die in the future just because they have to take the risk of selling something at a loss over and over. i mean really, how could sony not do this again in the future? people already are saying that the ps4 should be less expensive than the ps3 was. they say the same for the wii u like , 250$? 200! at the most! who knows if there will even be a ps5 if sony keeps on making so many losses. i dont know if they actually follow the same road for their tv division, or if there, they really just have to deal with terrible sales. but, increasing losses will, one day or another, start to take its toll even on a company as big as sony.
on the other hand, theres companies doing exactly the opposite, adding another 200$ to the tab cause theres like a little apple somewhere on the hardware and being praised too. but at least they only sell you meaningless additional shit afterwards, like docking stations.
anyway, i know a lot of this is just my personal opinion and it may be slightly nintendo biased (even though i own like 3 sony consoles) but its certainly not entirely baseless.