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Nintendo Already Anticipating Holiday Wii Shortages
As we approach the holiday season, Nintendo has already said that they don't expect to keep up with demand for the Wii console. In an interview with the LA Times, Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime said they're ramping up production by 33% already, with further increases planned. They're hoping to avoid the scarcity of Wii's that occurred last year, which cost them a great deal of money in potential sales. "We're now producing 2.4 million units a month worldwide. Last year, we made 1.6 million a month. So we've made a 33% increase. One of our competitors projects they will sell 10 million consoles worldwide this year. For us, that's three months of production. We're producing an unprecedented level of hardware to try to meet demand."
The 360 in its simplest form is missing quite a bit of capability. Notably, Live Arcade and such is mostly useless without a hard drive. PS3 is the most robust system, but costs so much and has so few games it is hard to sell. Wii is kind of perfect, even with the large quantity of shovelware crap 3rd parties are putting out.
Expanding manufacturing lines costs money and depending on the unit price and the expected sales volume that may not be profitable. Since the Wii was "available" during the year that suggests the non-christmas demand is about equal to the manufacturing capacity being used, increasing capacity for christmas only and having superfluous capacities afterwards can be pretty unprofitable.
I'll do the same thing I did last-gen. I'll buy whichever is the most-popular console when it hits $199. And I'll buy the Nintendo Wii if it's either $100 flat or $150 with a free game.
That's a contradiction, the Wii is the most popular console. The DS hasn't seen a price drop since release (maybe the old DS back when it was obsoleted by the DS lite), all signs point towards Nintendo using the same strategy for the Wii.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.