I will have to run the numbers again but I ran them a while back and for the scale of things they are doing the costs could easily be part of the dev/advertising budget. Most of these games and the amount of resources required by them are far from world leading tech and data centres needed for it.
I start hostile and they have to prove themselves, same thing I use for everything else in life. I see very little chance of Nintendo doing well here though as they have had many years now and hosed it up time and time again and are not particularly showing anything to make me expect otherwise (they have not drafted another company in to run it from what we have seen, their job positions they are offering don't show them seeking real talent, if their in house gave us the howlers on the 3ds and wii then yeah, the will have had probably about two years to deploy it properly by the time this hits). There is no step back, there is no benefit of the doubt, there is no cushion. Stand tall or don't stand at all.
Equally my no money is where my mouth is for the efforts of MS and Sony. They have not justified it either from where I sit.
As others said $20 is not a lot but is a lot more than $0 which we have been used to.