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The Wii Launches in Japan
The Wii has launched in Japan, successfully and without many of the incidents associated with the PlayStation 3 launch. Joystiq's coverage of the Wii's painless Nippon birth has nothing but praise for the crowd control efforts of electronics outlets. The talk is entirely of sellouts and happy gamers. From the article: "Numerous methods of retail were used to launch the Wii, and these varied from store to store. Yodobashi kept its customers camped overnight in a parking lot, distributing numbered tickets to determine the order of entrance, before opening its doors at 7am. Bic Camera also opened at 7am, although most of the 650 people in line there didn't arrive until the first trains of the morning began to run at around 5am. Famitsu reports that the Tokyo Ikebukuro branch of Bic Camera sold out if its allocation of 1,200 units, while the Tokyo Yuuraku-cho arm of Bic Camera declared the console "sold out" at 5.41am when the 1,500th person arrived in the queue there." Kotaku has even more extensive coverage, with plenty of photos of the waiting lines.
6.5% (estimation from 2000 numbers) of the US population lives in New York and about 3% in New York City. Assuming that Times Square actually Toys'R Us got 3000, that's reasonable since it's a very central location. 1200 was in just one store, not necessarily the hugest one either.
Yes...they've only had one quarter EVER where they posted a loss, and that loss was due to some bad investments overseas when the value of the yen dropped, and they got screwed on the currency exchange.
Actually, the impression that I got wasn't that they were holding it for weeks with poor Wii releases, but weeks were they would have otherwise poor VC releases. They are planning on releasing 1-5 new VC games every week. Most weeks this is going to be a couple B list titles and one or two C list titles. Every month or two, they will release one of the A list titles (SMB, etc..) instead.
From the point of view of giving everyone their favourite game right away, not the best. From the point of view of building constant attention and interest in the VC, I think it is the right way to go. Every Monday, everyone is going to be waiting to see what goes up this week. Some people will grab a game, play it for a week and then grab something from the next Mondays offering.
It seems to probably be true. It was a big deal when it happened, and every news site reported it as the first ever loss for Nintendo "since going public in 1962."