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Nintendo May Pull Wii Ads To Avoid Hype

Posted by Zonk on from the very-merry dept.

Due to the lack of product on store shelves and overwhelming demand, Nintendo is considering plans to pull marketing campaigns for the Wii during the holiday season. "The company recently dismissed suggestions that it intentionally engineered shortages to build up hype for the Wii. It claims to be producing 1.8 million of the consoles each month at full capacity. 'The issue of supply management has to be questioned, not least because 2008 is going to be the crunch year for the Wii. It's then that we'll discover whether it's a fad or something with legs,' Screen Digest analyst Piers Harding-Rolls told The Times."

5 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully next year we'll find out if the iPod is just a fad or if it has legs too. How long does something have to be popular to officially not be called a fad?

    1. Re:oh good by p0tat03 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's a "fad" so long as a minority group of people can act smug and self-righteous about not going with the flow :)

    2. Re:oh good by DerekLyons · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As opposed to the minority who act all smug and self-righteous because they have the latest cool gadget?

  2. Re:Makes sense by EggyToast · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree with you, except that Coke is a beverage; their advertising isn't to get people to buy a singular item, but to get people to think "Hey, a Coke, I should drink one."

    I see lots of billboards around bus stops with, say, 3 empty cans of coke that say "3 hour meeting" or something witty. Their advertising is trying to get people to drink more of their product. Arguably, those people are already coke drinkers -- they just don't drink enough for Coca-Cola.

    People only buy one Wii, though, and if everyone is buying all they can make, they don't need to advertise. Coke, though, there's always coke on the shelf, so there's always more to sell.

  3. Re:Flipping Wii's by EMeta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    EBay Wii resellers are just an inevitable part of the economics of capitalism. If this was a commodity, the price would rise instantly as demand started to approach supply. Here, Demand far exceeds supply, so the MSRP is an artificial price ceiling. If I was in the market for a Wii and didn't have the time to search for one, I would appreciate that there was service charge I could opt to pay for someone else to find one for me. In other words, why the hostility towards the trade?