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The State Of Wii Preorders
1up has a hilarious article up looking at the state of Wii Preorders across the U.S.. Despite the fact that preorders began (and likely ended) this morning at EBs and Gamestops across the country, the employees of the megalithic game store were less than fully prepared. From the article: "WEST VIRGINIA: GameStop #1330: 'We don't know. I mean, we're gonna be doing reserves. We're just waiting for them to tell us we can.' WISCONSIN: EB Games #4626: 'It looks more like we'll just sell that one. Because there will be 2 to 4 million units available on launch day, and EB/GameStop will be getting 70% of them that first come first serve would be doable. Even a smaller store like ours could be getting upwards of 50 units day one.' WYOMING: EB Games #4294: 'Any day now, man. Any day now.'" Despite my wife's best efforts, I missed out on a preorder by three people in line. Stupid cross-country trips.
If Zelda, WarioWare, Wii Sports, Excite Truck, etc, haven't gotten you excited yet, then stick with your current console(s). Different people like different games, and you'll just be disappointed if you buy a console become other people say it's cool.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
They'er going to have my favorite game: resell on eBay for double the price!
The sequel is also good: Buy another a few weeks later.
Three reasons.
1: Interest on $50,000,000 for a month (You really think the costs of running the pre-order operation for a day are going to exceed $4 million?)
2: Gets the customer into the store two times, increasing the opportunity for additional sales
3: Requires the customer to provide personal information that they can sell
This is unconfirmed. A Nintendo executive did give a number, but then another (presumably more important) executive said he was wrong.
That's the answer to all of your questions, actually: Nintendo won't tell EB (or anyone) how many consoles they're getting. EB really wants to avoid a situation where they oversell preorders, so they're being very conservative with their preorder allotment. If rumours are accurate, most EB stores will take preorders for 10-20 consoles, and will receive a shipment of 3-4 times that many for release day.
There is a very good reason for not raising prices, if the Wii or the PS3 was priced higher, then while those companies would make more money, some people would be turned off by the high price and buy an XBOX 360. And once someone already owns a 360 they are less likely to buy another console in the future because of the investment. By pricing the PS3 and Wii lower than demand, instead of buying a 360 people may wait for the other consoles to become available. Also, optimal pricing is hard to predict, like the 360 in Japan (which got a small fraction of consoles compared to North America) and the PSP didn't sell out at launch.