@marokai: I get what you're saying, but I think making two versions of this thing at the outset would have been super confusing to the marketplace and killed at least some of the excitement around this thing. Plus Nintendo has to Nintendo so there's no way they were shipping a simple box you could plug into your TV with normal controllers. That's just not in their corporate DNA anymore; they tried it with the Gamecube and it didn't do great.
I also don't necessarily think that the...weirdness...of the Switch is responsible for the price gouging. The pro controller is just a controller. Maybe it has the HD rumble stuff built in (I can't really tell) but there's no way it costs much more to make than a PS4 controller, which has a touchpad and lightbar. It just costs more because Nintendo loves to price gouge their customers.
Also the $70 pro controller comes with a power cord that's like 3 feet long, so you can't play while you charge it. For $70 you'd think they could have sprung for a 10 foot cord.
Likewise the fact that an extra dock costs $90 is ludicrous. It's basically a USB hub/HDMI passthrough with some extra plastic, and it should cost closer to $20-$30.
Could Nintendo offer these things cheaper? Absolutely. Easily. But that's not Nintendo's way of doing things. They want you to view their products as being of premium quality rather than commodities and they think price is part of that. So while Microsoft is happy to make Xbox One controllers the generic default PC controller and sell them for $30 via periodic sales, Nintendo would see that as devaluing their brand.
It's a mindset, not a technical challenge.
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