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Wii Shortages Could Last For Months
Next Generation is reporting that, apparently, the Wii shortages could continue for some time yet. This is news from Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo's VP of marketing and corporate affairs, speaking to the Game Theory Podcast. Says Kaplan, "There is a lot going on behind the scenes in terms of working on what we are producing and the numbers continue to rise but the product is so very popular that we may see a supply / demand situation last for some time. We are at absolute maximum production and doing everything we can. The number of units that we have been able to produce has far exceeded our hardware production in the past and the production levels of a lot of our competitors but demand continues to be really high."
A statement from the VP of marketting on hardware production and logistics?
Call me crazy, but seems like Nintendo is manufacturing hype at this point.
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I asked about the Wii and PS3 at my local gamestore not too terirbly long ago. The Wii's waiting list had been hovering around 100 people ever since it came out. The PS3 had 18 units in back waiting to be sold. Maybe fun really is more important than pretty?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
You do realize, its the VP of marketing's JOB to tell us crap, the VP of hardware production and logistics should be out there making us more Wii-s.
It's quite simple actually... the Wii is not made for "normal" games. If you want to play "normal" games, get a PS2 or a PC.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
granted, i got mine at release so this is semi-hypocritical, but i don't think the demand should be that high...
other then WiiSports, Zelda, and some VC games that any PC less then a decade old can emulate, there are no good games and other then PaperMario, which looks ok, none on the horizon either.
seriously, as of december, my wii has not been touched...the 2 360's in my house, on the other hand, are both played for hours daily and fights break out frequently over the Oblivion disc and now the GH2 guitar.
honestly, i don't understand how i can't walk into best buy and not get a wii but the shelves are packed with 360's. Is the hate for M$ really that ingrained that people won't buy it even though it is by far the best system out right now?
Use the nunchuck as a movement joystick, and the remote has 2 easy access buttons (1,2) and the nunchuck has 2 (c,z), along with 4 menu buttons (up,left,right,down arrows) and two option buttons (plus,minus).
Not terribly many games use more than 4 quick access buttons, and 6 menu buttons. A few, yes, but not really that many.
Most games do use just one joystick, unless its a FPS game, which traditionally use two, and you can see why the Wii won't need two joysticks.
I get the idea that Nintendo is going to drop the ball on this. Having a hot system is one thing, but not being able to match demand for a console that your business is going to revolve around (outside of the DS) for the next couple of years while games sit on the shelves untouched because nobody can play them is sheer incompetence. If it's a game, then Nintendo is betting a lot. If they lose and people get sick of waiting, then they're going to sink. Seriously, what is the problem? They're not amateurs at this, this is their bread and butter.
Clearly you're a gamer, so you don't understand how real people game. You've got a game maintenance cycle. If you can't buy a new game every month, you don't care about the console.
Real people are not buying the Wii to play a game every month. They're spending $300 to play WiiSports. That's it! If the console never does anything else, they still got to play WiiSports for a couple of months. The entertainment cost is comparable to going to the movies once a week.
Keep in mind that first, real people don't sit down and game for hours every day. Bringing the Wii out on Saturday afternoon is a treat. It's like Monopoly or Scrabble. This keeps it fun longer.
Real people also don't have a whole set of consoles. When they're playing the Wii, they're getting the full enjoyment of "I'm playing a videogame!" on top of "I'm playing WiiSports." You no longer have fun just because you're playing a videogame. For you it has to be either a GREAT videogame or a NEW videogame.
So all these real people are going out and buying the Wii, and guess what? There are about four times as many of them as there are people like you. The whole videogame hardware production pipeline was geared towards the forty million people who buy videogames regularly, divided among three console brands and the PC. When the wider population taps in the pipeline hits capacity fast. I guess you don't remember Pac-man. Same thing happened.
Each Wii owned by a real person will probably only run four to eight games in the next five years. Shocking, isn't it? Nintendo isn't scared of this because that's where they already were... I know I only played about eight games on my Cube, and only six on my N64. They were all great, and I haven't had time for more than that. A game or two a year is my console limit as an adult, even though I work in the field.
So think Scrabble, not Halo, and you'll get it.
I understand shortages regarding the 360 and the PS3 because of the leading edge technologies, but the Wii is essentially a Gamecube with twice the power. I don't understand where the production bottle neck is considering that the Wii represents mature technologies, unless there are production issues with the "Broadway" and "Hollywood" graphics and CPU chips.
I know the DS has been in short supply at times, but not to the extent that the Wii has experienced. People are genuinely frustrated with Nintendo's seeming inability to produce enough Wiis to fill demand and I think it might hurt them in the long run.
It's easy to jump to that conclusion but is there really any precedent from Nintendo specifically for something like that? IIRC, the only sort of consumer-physological maneuvering from Nintendo in the past would be the vaporware SNES-CDrom addon that was announced supposedly just to screw with Sega. I've heard that actually became Sony's PS1 and the big N didn't release it b/c Sony wanted more action than they were prepared to give them. I could be getting this wrong. Other than that the only evil corporation type nonsense from Nintendo with which I've had a problem would be their attitude towards emulation (outright calling it illegal), a relatively benign thing in itself. Sony with its rumored strong-arming of vendors concerning their support for the Dreamcast around the launch of the PS2, amoung other things more recently, and MS's countless trespasses over the years are another story.
I'm not a Nintendo fanboy (Wii is my first system from them in like a decade), but they seem relatively honest to me, even to the point of hurting themselves competition-wise. I can remember the president of Nintendo actually kind of whining at one point about people's lack of interest in the gamecube in favor of the more "realistic" games of the xbox/ps2. That was an honest statement embarrassingly devoid of spin. At the end of the day, I would think they would simply want to sell as many systems as they can. Don't believe the Gamestop FUD. Besides, if I hadn't just happened upon a Wii a few weeks ago on a random visit to Blockbuster of all places, I might never have gotten one. My interest was, as I think many people's has been, waning rather than building, what with the difficulty of procuring one of the damn things. I just don't think the shortage is really helping sales, especially if it is going to last for months more into the future. I don't think it's intentional.
According to that article yesterday, Nintendo is selling more than twice as many units as PS3 or Xbox360. So I doubt this is really a case of "artificial" shortage, although obviously the Nintendo marketing guys will spin it to their best advantage.
N certainly earned its share of negative karma. You're dead on about the SNES CD with Sony, but they also broke the cardinal rule of Japanese business and partnered with Phillips (a non-Japanese company) as a 2nd try to not be caught with their pants down on the transition to CD games.
Also in the day, Nintendo didn't let 3rd party companies release too many games per year to avoid them from overshadowing 1st party title release volume so you find things like Konami releasing games until the Ultra label and other oddities.
Then you have stock-fixing at stores where they'd be denied the newest most-in-demand SNES games unless they also stocked a bunch of tepid Game Boy items that simply weren't selling.
Right now there are no saint video game company players. But, I think Nintendo took it on the chin enough with the sales of N64 and Gamecube that they know they gotta be on their best behavior.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Not that the console market works like that. Console prices don't fall at retail until well after production is sufficient to meet demand. While some Wiis do get sold at a considerable markup, Nintendo doesn't capture the benefits. eBay, Amazon's zShops, and what have you benefit. As do the individuals who sell through those sites.
Production capacity is expensive to maintain. If you have it and don't use it, you don't get a discount on the costs of the facilities. If, in your first scenario, they sell the 100 units and the market is saturated Nintendo should then immediately sell their facilities to get rid of the costs of owning (but not using) them. In your second scenario, you need a production capacity to make the 90 unit supply. But you don't use it for the first few shipping cycles. The phantom benefits you describe get obliterated by the excessive costs.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
It might also have to do with them selling more units faster than any other system. The Wii is not a trivial thing to produce, nor is a PS3. You see PS3's on the shelf because the initial demand has been met. The Wii's has not and has sold 2 to 3 times more units. It's simply a matter of Nintendo mis-gauging demand. They felt it would take longer for the Wii to 'Catch on' as is evidenced by the lack of 'casual gamer' titles available (both Wii, and VC).
They ramped up launch production so they could launch with about 2 million units world wide, and meet 6 million by the end of their fiscal year. At that point they felt their demand would be met, and wouldn't need any more capacity since 50% of all their hardware sales are Quarter 4 (typically) and they would have enough capacity to meet the next wave of demand. Wii sales exceeded their expectations, plain and simple.
on the Wii, however, I was within only a couple of kills of them. 10-9, 15-13, that kind of thing. The controls really are that much easier to use, and that much more intuitive.
This doesn't mean the Wii controls are easier to use. It just means your stepsons are just as bad at using the Wii controls as you are.
Just wait a few months until they've spend 10x more time on the Wii than you have and I'm sure they'll be kicking your butt again. Will that mean the Wii controls have suddenly become less intuitive?
paintball