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."

Comments

Re:Local Gamestore

[CogDissident]

I bought a Wii, a half dozen games, a gamecube controller, gamecube memory card, another half dozen gamecube games, and an extra wii-mote, and only just barely hit the cost of a ps3. That was the biggest selling point to me.

Re:Snatching Defeat from the Hands of Victory?

[Kingrames]

They can't "drop the ball on this" unless Microsoft or Sony creates their next-gen system right now with a motion-sensitive remote controller.

Nearly 90% of the "too old to play video games" age people I run into (mom, dad, uncles, etc.) say that they're interested in the Wii. My dad admitted that the reason he's interested in it is because the controller is a remote, and he knows how to use a remote. Or at least, he'd never admit that he didn't know how to use a remote.

But any other gaming platform? They wouldn't own up to the fact that they could figure out how to play games on them.

Re:Not a big deal...

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Say what?

I could be getting this wrong.

Yeah, that sums it up.

Nintendo was committed to a CDRom attachment for the Super NES. The product (known as the "Play Station") almost made it to market. Right up until the CEO of Nintendo read the contract and realized that they had basically sold the farm to Sony. He nixed the deal at the 11th hour. Nintendo then started working with Phillips to create a joint CDRom design.

Nintendo eventually realized that Phillips didn't know their heads from their rears and pulled out. But not before Phillips decided that they had the best thing since sliced bread. Phillips managed to get a license to produce a few Mario and Zelda titles out of the deal, and thus the worst Mario and Zelda games ever imagined were made for the (you guessed it!) Phillips CD-i. Nintendo ended up skipping the CDRom format altogether, and stuck with cartridges until the DVD was available. (GameCube discs are Mini-DVDs recorded at Constant Angular Velocity.)