1 Million Wii Units At Launch

Ars Technica is reporting on Nintendo's announcement that there will be 1 Million Wii units available at launch in the United States. Not only is that an impressive number of units, it's twice what the 360 launched with, and more than twice what Sony will be offering when it launches in the same month. From the article: "If Nintendo sells that many systems on the first day, and they turn a profit on every system sold, Nintendo is going to have some very rosy financials heading into the holiday season. If they're making money on systems as well as games, and gamers embrace the virtual console, this may be one of the most successful launches in gaming history. We'll see if they are able to deliver the numbers they're talking about here; a launch that large would be a major coup for Nintendo, and would give them a running start towards getting their systems into the homes of as many customers as possible." So, despite some disappointment at the later-than-hoped-for launch date, it looks like Nintendo is making good use of its time.

Comments

Nice!

[RyanFenton]

I just hope EB and other game stores will start taking preorders based on how many they expect to get soon. Hopefully one or two per customer.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Nice!

[jferris]

Some FYE stores have started taking preorders. I preordered a Wii and Zelda: TP this past Saturday. Was in there for something else, and just happened to ask at the checkout.

It's surprising really

[The MAZZTer]

Considering Nintendo is trying to be the most innovative, it's surprising that they're the only ones sticking to the classic business strategies to actually make money off of a product and to actually make an effort to meet demand.

Re:It's surprising really

[Chris Burke]

Being conservative and classical in their business management gives them the financial stability to be progressive and innovative in their console design. That's just how I see it.

demand

[the computer guy nex]

"Considering Nintendo is trying to be the most innovative, it's surprising that they're the only ones sticking to the classic business strategies to actually make money off of a product and to actually make an effort to meet demand."

It also has a lot to do with the hardware - the Wii is an incredibly similar system to the Gamecube architecture-wise. The components are also cheaper and easier to produce.

Re:demand

[StocDred]

Hey, the wireless 360 controller is $50, and that doesn't include a built-in speaker or a tiny bit of memory to hold your player data. So it seems like Nintendo is pretty much right in line, with their $40 remote + $20 nunchuk. I'm sure we all wish everything was less expensive.

Re:demand

[RobDogAlpha]

Why does everyone forget the massive R&D for the Wiimote and the production costs for it and the motion sensor bar?

Re:demand

[Cadallin]

Yeah, I mean, if you have to buy 3 more controllers to play 4-player multiplayer, the Wii is $490! That's more expensive than a 360 and almost enough for the PS3!

Oh, wait, except you're getting a console, a game, and four wireless controllers for that price. For my Xbox, that would run a grand total of $600 + a game. $700+ for a PS3 and controllers.

$60 is $60, but seriously people, at launch a Gamecube + 3 controllers would have run, what $320 for system + four corded controllers? It's not that bad. Get over it.

Are you seriously saying you couldn't get by on $300 for a Wii + Twilight Princess? Because I know that's going to tide me over for a while. I'm reminded of two Penny-Arcade comics:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/09/15

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/08/25

Unlike the low-end 360 and PS3, a Wii is actually functional right out of the box. You can even *gasp* save your games without buying anything else.

Re:demand

[Cadallin]

Here's the thing, looking this deeply into the economics of a form of entertainment is going to be disheartening. It's pretty much always going to turn out that you're spending a lot of money to do the things you enjoy. If four controllers are too expensive for you, don't buy them (I mean, most of have to make decisions and trade-offs about the things we buy, right?). I won't until there's a fairly significant amount of compelling gameplay out there to justify it, and even then it might be pretty iffy, as historically I haven't played that many 4-player games. No matter how you slice it, the Wii is going to be much less expensive than any other comparable console setup. And you know what? That extra $200 for the family with 3 kids is going to be least of the expenses they incur because of having too many damn kids (and if they're having that much trouble, maybe they shouldn't have had them in the first place, kids are expensive, its not like this should be a suprise to anybody). They may be turned off by it, and they're welcome to go the competition, who will be happy to take twice as much money, or more.

Let's face it, there's a lot of stuff in the controllers in the first place. Such that I can easily see where my money is going when I buy one. There may be a good $10 in profit for Nintendo there, but I don't begrudge them that. Does that make me irrational? Mario Party and the other Nintendo party games are, once you work in their specific costs, some of the more expensive titles out there. Probably a good $75-$80 once you account for the necessary accessories divided between them.

Correction...

[mabba18]

1 Million units in North America for launch says Rob Bertram, Nintendo of Canada's Vice President

Re:Virtual Console a Weakness

[ElleyKitten]

Depends on if I can save the game to an SD card or not. If I can "keep" the game and play it at someone else's house, then cool, if not, then eh.

I want to save it to an SD card or whatever and stick it in my DS or the next Game Boy. That would be sweet.

Re:of course they are making a profit

[Anonymous Coward]

All signs point to Nintendo making a huge profit on each Wii, I wouldn't be surpised with a sub $100 manufacturing cost of the Wii. All of the controllers included probably adds another $50 or so.

Well ... I highly doubt that ...

Perrin Kaplin (Nintendo's VP of Marketing) claimed that the Wii would be breaking even on hardware costs and would be a system which was profitable from the start because of game sales. She could be lying but I would assume she would not stretch the truth too much. We know that a year into the development of the Wii (in about 2002) Nintendo decided to switch directions from producing a "super powerful" system to a system that required far less power and still performed well; one of the turning points was when they saw how much less power the Gamecube would require (which lead to the system being on 24 hours a day)

"When we were struggling to reduce the power consumption, there was a point in time when we simulated how power consumption would change in existing devices if we applied cutting-edge semiconductor technology to them. In the case of the GameCube, we discovered that the power consumption could be reduced to between one-third and one-quarter of the consumption of the GameCube's semiconductors. I was really impressed with these results. Of course, I was surprised by the data itself ..."

We know that the Wii requires 80% of the power of the Gamecube so one can assume that it is not a repackaged gamecube as some people would have you belive. The system is produced by IBM, using the same process as was used with the PowerPC970 (G5), at the same time the G5 would have been in development so it is possibly a low speed (1.5 GHz) G5 based system; although it would be inexpensive, it would still cost money to produce.

Re:of course they are making a profit

[poot_rootbeer]

if their profit was so huge they wouldn't risk their market by princing the pack at $250/250

If they think 1 million Wiis will sell out at launch at a $250 pricepoint, they'd be fools to make the launch price lower than that, regardless of how large their profit margin is.

If demand starts to wane after a while, they can reduce the price to $200 and still make a profit on every unit. Until then, they've just made at least $50 million off the early adopters that they otherwise wouldn't have.

Re:Copy ROM to SD

[KDR_11k]

I'm guessing it's possible immediately. You remember that SD cards have built in DRM support?

Re:Virtual Console a Weakness

[poot_rootbeer]

If they don't flood the VC with all the piles of crap ever produced for Nintendo systems (no Deadly Towers, no Superman 64), then maybe they can make the risk for the consumer low enough that they'll feel $5 is worth it.

I've had just about enough of your "Deadly Towers"-bashing, young man.

DT is not a BAD game, just a mediocre one. I could easily name a dozen NES titles which were an order of magnitude worse, and that's not even counting anything by Color Dreams.

I mean, I wouldn't spend $2 to get it on the Virtual Console, but it's not nearly as awful as SeanBaby makes it out to be.

Re:Virtual Console a Weakness

[Josiah_Bradley]

I myself own over 50 classic NES titles and about 20 SNES and N64 titles and a couple Gamecube games as well as some Sega Genisis games. Shouldn't there be at least a discount for those of us who already purchased these games at retail prices years ago? I know of at least 20 games for the NES I want to play again without having to fix my NES, but at around 100$ to do so it would be cheaper to re-build my old consoles. I'm more than happy paying for the bandwidth as some of those n64 games are huge, but another 5-10$ for a 30-50$ game?? just to play it again on the same TV? I love the idea and will most likely pay for everything again just feels so wrong. On another note it is legal for me to play my legally bought games on an emulator for free on my TV with upsampling and better graphics.

Number of Wiis per store

[Gamingboy]

I decided to do some math to determine how many Wiis there would be per store if every store in North America that I could find store figures for got the same amount of wiis.

So here's the math:
4,500 Gamestop/EB Games (some outside of North America)
3,256 Wal-Marts (USA stats only)
90 Rhino Video Games
786 Best Buys (US and Canada)
118 Future Shops (Canada)
32 Fry's Electronics (US)
635 Circuit Cities (US)
1447 Targets (US)
700 Toys 'r' Us (US stats only)
1 Nintendo World (New York City)

To come out with 11,565 possible Launch stores in North America. Of course, this doesn't include smaller chains and family owned businesses, but the results that will come from 1,000,000/11565 should give us a rough estimate on how many Wii's will be available at Launch in most stores.

It comes out at about 86 Wiis per store if we were to only include those chains. Of course, there will not be 86 wiis available at your local Wal-Mart in Hicksville, USA (or Canada), but it's nice to know that, if Wii distribution were communist, every major store would have 86 of them.

Nintendo Customer Service

[DocBoss]

Well nintendo doesn't screw over their customers like sony does. When I had a DS with 1 dead pixel I sent it in to nintendo and they replaced it.