Nintendo Refutes Wii Shortage

Nintendo has responded to accusations leveled against it earlier this week by GameStop, saying that Wii shortages are due to demand. Nintendo's George Harrison told Next-Gen.biz in a phone interview that "That's not at all the case. We have worldwide territories that are all competing over the available production. The Japan and European markets are doing extremely well with the Wii. People in Japan at NCL [Nintendo Co. Ltd.] are making the best decisions that they can about which products get shipped to which market and when." An EU marketing director is also quoted at GamesIndustry.biz responding to criticism about the lack of new Wii titles, as well as the supply shortage. Nintendo's Laurent Fischer asserts that the company has a 'release it when it's ready' attitude, and that they'll release products when they meet the company's standards.

Comments

Business people annoy me

[Forrest Kyle]

I think it says volumes about how far removed from the realities of engineering your average "business person" is that releasing something when it's done is viewed as some kind of rogue attitude.

I would rather have 80% fewer games released every year, if each game was well crafted by a team with full creative control who were passionate about what they were working on and had ample time to finish. The only thing releasing a deluge of unfinished but in-time-for-christmas junk accomplishes is it lines the pocket of the kinds of sharks the industry could do without.

Re:LOL @ "Wii Shortage"

[zippthorne]

It's much more simple than that. There is an impulse of demand right at the beginning, and possibly increasing demand following that, but the production is a continuous process. So unless you over-produce (and incur the capital expense of setting up more factories than necessary) there will be a shortage at the beginning, and it will continue until production out paces increasing demand (due to exposure) for long enough to catch up.

Ideally, they will size their production to the continuous demand at middle-of-life to end-of-life, rather than over build and then decommission factories that do not produce enough to break even before becoming unnecessary.

The other option is more liquid pricing, similar to the way airlines do it, to ensure that everyone that wants one badly enough can get one, but this does not help customer goodwill and leads to cries of "price gouging."

Effect of marketing..

[stratjakt]

Do you think the "wii would like to play" campaign has helped this a bunch?

Compare it to the PS3 commercials, where like a creepy baby explodes or ... i dunno, i dont know what the fuck I'm looking at. And then it says "its thinking". Maybe that was Dreamcast, they promoted it with nonsense too. I remember the commercial for Jet Grind Radio, and it was a bunch of screaming japanese people, I guess spoofing wacky japanese TV. You wouldn't know what the commercial was for, and the game itself kicked ass - all you needed was to show some ingame footage to sell it.

I see PS3's campaign and MSFT's skip-rope jump in the game campaign, and as a gamer, wonder "what the fuck are they tyring to sell me?"

Nintendo's sort of say "hey, check this out - it has no plans to dominate your whole life or change your lifestyle, or reinvent the way you watch tv - it's just a fun toy that anyone could have a blast with, and it's cheap too"

I guess I'm saying I see Sony and MSFT distancing themselves from selling a "gaming console". They want to pretend they sell obscure services and convergance and other crap people dont understand, or even want.