Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo May Pull Wii Ads To Avoid Hype
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."
Ahh but everyone doesn't like to listen to music
Well yeah, there are a few weird people who don't like music, but they're not a significant portion of the population.
more specifically, not everyone wants to invest money to have a large selection of music on a portable device
Considering how well the Walkman did, though, there sure are a lot of people who do.
we do know that a significant portion of the population likes to play games
Games, yes. Video games are substantially different from other types of games, however, and waggle isn't going to change that.
The "attachment rate" of games is always likely to be low
The attachment rates for the other two systems in this generation are quite a bit higher, for the record, especially in terms of third-party games.
When you open the market to more casual users, they devote fewer resources to the use of the device, be it an MP3 player or a gaming console. This could be troubling for the viability of the console in the market if Nintendo relied upon game sales to make a proit, but they don't; they actually make money on each console sold so it is not like selling lots of onsoles and few games will hurt them financially as it would Sony or MS.
No, but it will hurt their reputation with game developers, which is a huge long-term problem. The reason why it's not a problem for the iPod to have a low attachment rate is because an MP3 will work on any MP3 player; music sales won't be affected because hardcore consumers are buying the same commodity as casual ones. A Wii game, on the other hand, will only work on the Wii, so if people don't buy games for it, developers will make games for other systems instead.
The only really troubling statistic for Nintendo would be if a large percentage of users bought Wii intending to use it for their own purposes, then resold it without the intention to repurchase a new one in the future.
That does appear to be happening, if you look on eBay.
Even if sales slow down drastically, it has already succeeded in opening up the market and changing the way the "game" is played.
You can't use sales of video game consoles and say that the market is opening up. Consoles are meaningless; it's the games themselves that are important. Not to mention the fact that the Wii has only sold 15 million units anyway, which is hardly a massive number.
Rob