I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that.
Increasing the marginal cost would let you spend more on materials or something, but gamepads are pretty darn reliable. It’s not like plastic needs to be replaced with metal or something. Though…you could maybe make an argument for Hall effect analog sticks rather than potentiometer-based analog sticks to avoid that damned analog drift. But in general, I don’t think that there’d be any drastic improvement you could get by having a controller that has a higher marginal cost.
Logitech sells a ton of gamepads. That means that the fixed costs, the costs that the manufacturer has to spend on regardless of how many units they make, are spread over many units – every customer who buys a gamepad pays just a little bit towards that. So it’s not like they have to skimp on R&D – they just spread it over a lot of units.
If you went out and engineered some sort of custom “sub gamepad”, you could spend $1M and make a single custom gamepad for that sub. Maybe it’d have the sub’s logo on it or something, but it probably wouldn’t buy much. And it’d probably have less R&D spending on that gamepad, which represents time spent debugging and testing it, than would the Logitech one.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that.
Increasing the marginal cost would let you spend more on materials or something, but gamepads are pretty darn reliable. It’s not like plastic needs to be replaced with metal or something. Though…you could maybe make an argument for Hall effect analog sticks rather than potentiometer-based analog sticks to avoid that damned analog drift. But in general, I don’t think that there’d be any drastic improvement you could get by having a controller that has a higher marginal cost.
Logitech sells a ton of gamepads. That means that the fixed costs, the costs that the manufacturer has to spend on regardless of how many units they make, are spread over many units – every customer who buys a gamepad pays just a little bit towards that. So it’s not like they have to skimp on R&D – they just spread it over a lot of units.
If you went out and engineered some sort of custom “sub gamepad”, you could spend $1M and make a single custom gamepad for that sub. Maybe it’d have the sub’s logo on it or something, but it probably wouldn’t buy much. And it’d probably have less R&D spending on that gamepad, which represents time spent debugging and testing it, than would the Logitech one.