7-9 Million Wiis by 2007?

Gamespot is reporting that Nintendo's production of the Wii is actually going better than expected. Analyst firm UBS is now estimating that 7-9 Million Wii units should be off the production lines by 2007. From the article: "Citing industry 'checks,' UBS analysts Alex Gauna and Steven Chin claim that Nintendo already made 2 million Wiis by the end of September. They go on to predict that, 'at least 7 million and potentially as high as 9 million more units are in the build plan for Q4 06. This production ramp handily exceeds a publicly announced target for 6 million units to ship by year's end.'"

Comments

Going so well

[nlawalker]

Everything is going so well for Nintendo. I really hope for them that the launch dates go off without a hitch and the awesome reviews start pouring in a few days later. It would be a make a huge impact in the definition of what "next-gen" games are if this console is a massive success.

Hopefully nothing has gone wrong in the production process. I can't imagine the stress of being a designer or tester for the console hardware. What happens when your company is successfully rolling millions of new machines off the line and someone finds a showstopper hardware bug? We all rememeber the Intel division fiasco.

Re:And we're going to buy them, and make games

[WillAffleckUW]

And when the dominant platform is the one at $200 developers will develop for it to sell more units.

Especially when the dev platform is only $1000 for the Wii, instead of ten times as much for the PS3 or 360 ones.

Re:what if problems arise?

[SoapDish]

I have no worries about this. I (or my brothers) have bought every nintendo system the day it came out since the SNES, and we've never had a problem, ever. I've had many, amany problems with my first of the run PS2, though.

Also, with the early production, maybe nintendo will test those first units to make sure the mass-manufacturing works well.

Re:Might not be enough

[cowscows]

Yeah, I thought about that, but I'm not sure that's entirely it. There are still plenty of older games that I still find fun. The bulk of my time on my DS is spent on Advance Wars, which is so simple that it could probably run on an NES no problem (with mildly downgraded artwork and sound.

Online multiplayer, however, I'll give you. That's a recent advance that's really benefitted as of late from technology, and has made some new types of games possible.

All that being said, I think my original point still stands. There have been many hyped up games, with beautiful visuals and such, which have ended up being not particularly fun. Packing more hardware into a box does not guarantee better games.