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Weak US Dollar Means Nintendo Favors Europe For Now
timeOday writes "The LA Times is reporting that the new Nintendo Wii Fit is hard to find on US shelves, due not only to strong demand but also the United States' declining status in the world economy: '"[Nintendo] is also is shrewdly maximizing its profit by sending four times as many units to Europe, reaping the benefits of the strong euro," says Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. "The shortage demonstrates one consequence of the weak dollar. We're seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit elsewhere."'"
I feel like a Canadian
how long until US quarters get stuck/rejected by Canadian vending machines and laundermat washing machines
that Europe won't recieve everything 4-12 months later than Japan and the US? Still waiting for SSB:B...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I wonder if this has anything to do with Bush running up trillions in debt and making everyone hate us?
Play Command HQ online
Europeans are already fit! Wii need it here so we can earn our dubba-chee!
I hate how Europe always gets shafted, especially when it comes to gaming.
Rarely do we ever get a title released here first, even titles that were developed here tend to get released in the USA first.
What's more, Nintendo, Sony AND Microsoft have all indicated that they don't care for Europe.
Sony is probably the worst offender, by giving us a stripped down PS3 at nearly twice the price as the US and Japan (There's only so much "tax" and "import costs" can account for).
Rock band is actually cheaper to import from the US than it is to buy in the shops (it's almost twice the price when you buy the set and the game!). This is really nothing new, but it's still infuriating the way we get treated.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If there is such strong demand, why not raise the price?
So, the *Wii* sucks because employees at your local department store buy them all up against the agreement Nintendo made with the store?
Nintendo is trickling just enough Wiis (yech) into the US sales channels to keep up interest while feeding markets that are actually making money. Unfortunately, the citizenry of the US rested on its laurels and consequently our nation has been conquered from within in the name of profit, and our economy has successfully been attacked and destroyed. The effects are only now starting to become apparent, compared to what's coming. The point is, the Wii isn't a joke, the US Economy is - and it's going to take a lot of sweat to correct it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've no idea, but there's no real reason to hold a title back from the UK just because they haven't translated it into French, Italian, German and Spanish (assuming it's not one of those titles with a language select in it, which are rare these days).
It wouldn't be so bad, but they never bother to translate American English into British English, so really, what's the point in waiting?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Or how about just initially releasing it in English for the vast majority of gamers who simply want to play the game? Even weirder is how the games are delayed even in those European countries that don't get a localized version.
My Sig: SEGV
I'd have expected the headline to say "Nintento Favours Europe"
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
The EU has no rules stating that companies have to release multi-lingual stuff. Individual countries (France) have rules related to language, but I think that mostly applies to advertising. There's nothing to stop them just releasing it in the UK and Ireland, so long as they don't prevent people elsewhere importing it if they want to.
Yes, at least in here in Poland it's a regular practice. What's totally fucked up is that english ones usually cost up to twice as much as the localised ones. Add that we aren't used to this kind of translations (movies in cinema are almost exclusively subtitled and TV uses voice-over via Gavrilov translation) and it just feels wrong to hear our language used by Stroggs and other alien invaders.
Turns out Europe overtook the US gaming market for FY2007.
I hate hearing the whining of the article repeated elsewhere: "We're seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit elsewhere." That link I just posted says Japan is #1 in sales at $11.5 B USD, Europe is #2 at $11.4 B USD and US only pulled in $10.7 B USD. So companies aren't ignoring their largest market; they're giving the leftovers to the third largest market. Deal.
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy. A weak dollar is not inherently bad either as it makes our exports more attractive and competitive.
It always amazes me. When the dollar is strong everyone says the U.S. is loosing economic power because of trade imbalances (weak exports). When the dollar is weak and trade exports are much higher, then people claim the U.S. is loosing economic power because of the weak dollar. Obviously neither interpretation is accurate. A strong dollar can be good and bad, a weak dollar can be good and bad. In this case American video game exporters are probably benefiting from less competition from Nintendo.
Such simplistic interpretations remind me of mercantilist theory, which is similairly idiotic. Carry on.
I mentioned the Wiis as signifier, not as a possible spur to economic recovery, and your attempt to distract from the actual conversation by depicting it as anything else is disingenuous at best.
With that said, a tide of social programs is one possible outcome. It was a possible outcome during the Great Depression, too, but in actuality we never really recovered from that until we began to receive and benefit from economic concessions from Germany and Japan following WWII.
This time it's hard to imagine where the money is going to come from. I'd like to see the public works projects, but they couldn't even bother to go save people's lives in New Orleans. I'm just not seeing it, sorry. Seriously, where does the money come from?
You doom-and-gloom predictions of "a lot of sweat to correct it" simply miss the point of what's really wrong.I really meant blood, but I didn't want to seem overly melodramatic. On the other hand, blood is the cost of the way we do business today - do you have any idea of what percentage of the shit we buy from China is produced in government-owned-and-operated forced labor camps filled predominantly with people whose primary crime is that they were the nails sticking up the farthest and they needed laborers? People are literally put into labor camps for being Christians... where they make the plastic shit that we hang on our christmas trees.
Closer to home, though, I really don't see things changing for the better without a major upset. I hope to be wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"largest market"? Last I checked, the EU had more inhabitants than the USA.
Just saying.
The US is a war-driven ecomony, which is unfortunate on many fronts, let alone creating weapons and systems that kill innocents en masse -- there's an associated brain drain, and the goods created in most cases have no material use that would enhance wealth -- but rather, these devices are designed to destroy wealth as well as human lives.
China has manufacturing capability up the ying-yang (no pun intended), and as I've stated before, if they were to choose to stop propping up the USD, the US would have far more to loose than they would. Also keep in mind the Euro markets that they could -- and probably are -- transistion to if they're smart.
No, I'm afraid this is a different situation. It might be "ok" for the dollar to have *some* weakness from time to time, but you can't tell me it would be fine if the bottom fell out on the dollar entirely.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
This depends on what country you're in, here in Sweden most people speak english well enough that until recently few games were translated to swedish, to this day many of the big titles (guitar hero, gta series, WoW and lots of others IIRC) are not available in swedish versions, yet we have to wait until the release of the versions of games translated to german and french before they're released, in english, here.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Developers: We can use your help.
In other words, about 95% of Europeans who play video games.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
It's been 15 years since I last came across anyone in mainland Europe that didn't speak any English at all - a very helpful French shop owner in a tiny town in Provence that, when he realized we were talking past each-other with my limited French, stopped a couple of random people who were passing by his shop and got them to translate.
On my last proper visit to Paris a couple of years ago it had been 12 years since last time I'd spent any amount of time there (I'd been on a couple of business trips where I spent 3-4 hours in town and then went back to London) in fact, I find it hard to practice my French as contrary to my last holiday there every French person I came across switched to English the second I had problems finding the right word, or butchered their language too much (my French teacher used to say that the one thing you should always make sure to get right in France is the sounds - if you pronounce things correctly you'll get away with almost anything - so far I think she's been right)
Your post is so reactionary and simple-minded that it certainly seems to have been written by an American, short on rationality as it is. In fact, in the last day or so /. has had several posts like yours modded up because they say absurd things such as the high cost of oil is due in part to the restrictions on domestic drilling.
If you think the US economy is in the shitter because of environmental protections you are an embarrassment to the genetic legacy your ancestors have bequeathed you.
The US economy is in the craphole because of the massive debt that has been leveraged against insolvent debtors. This came in the form of the mortgage crisis and its effects have reverberated and multiplied through the banking system. This has led to a crisis in commercial credit which has taken away the ability of consumers to fuel the economy which further erodes the ability of the banking system to maintain solvency. The causes of the credit crisis caused by the tanking of the mortgage system has not yet finished and we are likely to see much worse before it stops.
Regarding the offshoring of manufacturing and environmentalism, the real impact of environmental legislation in the United States is not to preserve non-human species, but to protect humans themselves. Look at the places where mining companies, steel refineries, chemical manufacturing plants, and pulp mills have operated and what you'll find are poisoned water tables and insanely elevated cancer rates. Additionally, the relative low-production of minerals from mining is due mainly to evisceration of the lands where valuable resources once existed, not due to the governmental restrictions on development.
For you to say something like "the tree huggers over her taking so much power" is laughable. Opening all the protected lands in the US would to natural resource exploitation do virtually nothing to fix the GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS let alone the paltry problem of the US economy stumbling against the stronger European economy. The kind of neanderthal thinking that bad economic times can generate amongst people is amazing and your post is an example of such stupidity.
Environmentalism has not caused the US economic crisis. Bad banking practice has.
blog
Queue sound of music stopping to a screech...
"Toyota has stated it will build a new factory in Canada instead of the US because of concerns US workers are less skilled."
"Toyota President calls American's stupid"
http://forums.motortrend.com/70/38630/the-general-forum/toyota-president-calls-americans-stupid/index.html
OPEC is doing this with their oil as well.
Nobody wants dollars any more. That their value hasn't collapsed completely is due to the fact that every foreign national banking system has a vault full of dollars. Unloading them all at once would be the biggest run on the banking system you've ever seen. So oil (and many other commodity) producers 'officially' trade their product in dollars. Unless you happen to have Euros, Yuan, or some other desirable currency. Then you get a discount.
Have gnu, will travel.
... is the fact that the UK too used to get most games 1 year after the USA. And don't think that any actually got internationalized to UK English and voice actors with UK accents. Mostly it was the US game, 1 year later. No idea if that's still the case, but it wouldn't surprise me too much.
Even weirder was buying a US import version of Sega's PSO for the Dreamcast, over half a year IIRC before it got released in Europe. The weird thing is: the US version already had all the language options. I don't mean just that it also had Spanish, but it also had German and French. So someone from the USA could jolly well play the game in German or French, but the people in Germany or France weren't supposed to.
Exactly what they needed that delay for, I don't even know. Certainly not for translations.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This isn't at all a symptom of the relative weakness of the dollar to the Euro, it's actually a perfect example of the complex self-regulation mechanisms of the global market.
More Wiis in Europe -> More gaming options for Europeans -> More gaming hours for Europeans -> Less working hours for Europeans -> Less, and lower quality, European goods -> Less demand for European goods on the US market -> Stronger dollar relative to the Euro.
So what's the problem?
Thanks for that Gavrilov link.
It brings back memories of watching porn in Poland dubbed by one male with a thick russian accent. We couldn't understand a word they said, but it was the funniest thing we'd seen in a while.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
I really meant blood, but I didn't want to seem overly melodramatic. On the other hand, blood is the cost of the way we do business today - do you have any idea of what percentage of the shit we buy from China is produced in government-owned-and-operated forced labor camps filled predominantly with people whose primary crime is that they were the nails sticking up the farthest and they needed laborers? People are literally put into labor camps for being Christians... where they make the plastic shit that we hang on our christmas trees.
What the fuck is that? Please show me where you got that information on China putting people into labour camps to produce commodity goods?Excuse me for saying this, but that paragraph makes you look like an ignorant dumbass. China is booming because, surprise, surprise, they embraced capitalism, and Chinese companies work very hard and pay very low wages, and their products sell well because of the resulting low prices. China is not a free country and open your mouth and criticise the government too much and you will get arrested, but they actually have a Chinese branch of the Catholic church (the Vatican and China have resolved a lot of their differences).
The last time China put people into labour camps for being Christian was during the Cultural Revolution, about 40 years ago.
You know, if people like you would actually read the news on occasion, and pay a little attention to what's happening beyond your borders, your economy might profit as a result of that enlightening knowledge.
Yes, well, here in Mexico we enjoy a nearly 100% markup over US prices (the Wii is US $470 and Wii Fit will run you US $150). And indeed you can see mountains of boxes in stores, even walmart stocks tons of wiifits and wiis. So while a lot of them will languish for a while on the shelf, Nintendo knows that those who sell will give them a really huge profit. By ignoring the economic reality of the country, where a cheaper console would indeed move a larger number of unis, they maximize their profit by catering to those who would indeed pay those sums for the console. Sadly that excludes about 98% of the population.
"We're seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit elsewhere"
Wiki indicates that there are approximately 495 million people[1] within the borders of the EU member states.
So America is not really "their largest market". The conversion rate is much more in favor of the EU residents.
We'll get our Wii Fits eventually, but only after people whos dollars are worth more than ours.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union
UK = England + Wales + Scotland + Northern Ireland
GB = Old fashioned term for England + Wales + Scotland
England = England
Commonwealth = lots of former colonies + UK
So you'd generally be safe using the UK where you would normally say 'England'.
Paying for the national Debt through the Gas Pump? When I was in California recently, I payed some four dollars for a gallon of gas. And I laughed my ass off because it's NOTHING! You people are funny with your "Gas prices are affecting daily life" billboards.
.five per liter. One dollar five per liter means roughly 70 Euro cents per liter. Damn. In most parts of Europe you pay 1.50/1.60 Euros per liter of gas. This includes Israel, at around 8 shekel. Granted, US fuel is of lower quality (87 octane rather than our 95 and 98), but still...
I can't even f#$%ng remember when I last saw gas that cheap in Europe and / or Israel. Think about it. That's roughly a dollar
And if you still think gas prices are too high, I got one word for you: Compact. The rental agency had a "mid-size" for me. A chevvy impala which could house a small indian tribe. Compact in the US is a mid-size family car everywhere else.
Not happy with the gas price? Don't buy a four ton truck that guzzles five gallons to the mile then. If all of y'all would invest less in pick up trucks with "In God we Trust" stickers on the back, you might find your gas prices quite agreeable.
Damn fools.