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

definitely holding back production

[Thanatos69]

Lets look at the numbers, depending on who you go through:

http://nexgenwars.com/
360 - 10.8M
PS3 - 2.3M
Wii - 5.3M

http://www.vgcharts.org/ngwars.php
360 - 9.8M
PS3 - 2.8M
Wii - 6.3M

so yeah, I can definitely see how they are holding back on production given that the system has been out for 4 months now and selling 1.5M a month. Could you imagine if they weren't holding back?

Re:Who let Gamestop talk?

[rhizome]

I really don't agree. In fact, I feel the Wii has the worst ratio of good to bad games out of the next-gen consoles.

Okay, this is just retarded and meaningless. You're using an online ratings site to say what you "feel," that everything besides Zelda sucks on the Wii. The only conclusion I can make is that you haven't played any of them at all, and perhaps you've never even touched a Wii. Wario Ware is an amazing piece of work that actually uses the controls nicely, SSX is great, and if you go to, say, the IGN Wii boards you'll find passionate attachments across the board for many of those games.

A criticism I'd allow is that a lot of the first wave games have been ports of existing games or engines with an updated control scheme to account for the lack of gamepad and all. People don't like SSX because the controls are too hard, other games are too short, and so on. There is definitely a bunch of whining about the learning curve on the controls and I think this is very healthy.

I think what we have here, both in the post I'm replying to and in this story overall is the fact that 90% of the gaming industry was taken by surprise by the Wii's popularity. Everybody thought graphics were paramount and the PS3 was going to blow the world away. So now we have a bunch of gaming touts who got caught out in their predictions and so now have to invent criticisms to re-establish their pundit primacy. The quickest way to predict the future reliably is that things are not very good right now: pessimism is the stock and trade of industry journalists. This isn't to excuse game studios, because most of them had to radically shift gears from the XBox360/PS3/HDTV gaming market to take advantage of the Wii's surprising popularity. So what we see is a lot of repurposed old titles released to fill the channel, then a slow trickle of new games that are specifically tailored to the unique traits of the Wii.

I think history is telling us that Nintendo hit a home run with the Wii, and all the stats nerds are sitting in the bleachers taking potshots at the visiting team for winning the game. XBox and Playstation are the stock in trade for many gamers, so it's predictable that they'd bite back when the cutesy Nintendo nerds get the advantage. Sour grapes in full effect.