DailyTech - Nintendo Producing 1.8 Million Wiis Monthly, Shortages Still Expected

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Gadgets Nintendo Producing 1.8 Million Wiis Monthly, Shortages Still Expected
Marcus Yam (Blog) - November 19, 2007 5:40 PM

47 comment(s) - last by BansheeX.. on Nov 21 at 2:05 AM

More Wii consoles than ever, but still hard to find, says Nintendo

After one year since the launch of the Wii, Nintendo is unable to keep up with customer demand. While some conspiracy theorists believe that Nintendo may be creating a shortage as a sales tactic, it’s more plausible the game maker underestimated demand for the Wii.

With the hot holiday buying season here, Nintendo fully knows that demand for its Wii console is higher than ever. Speaking to Next-Gen, Nintendo marketing chief George Harrison said that production rate of Wii is now greater than ever.

“We’re at a rate now worldwide of about 1.8 million Wiis produced every month, and that’s going to sustain itself until we get on top of this,” said Harrison. “We’re trying to make decisions on almost a weekly basis about which market to ship the product to, because in Japan it’s a big success, and same in Europe ... It’s almost an embarrassment of opportunity in terms of where to place those Wii hardware units.”

Despite injecting 1.8 million Wiis into the market every month, don’t expect the console to be easily seen sitting idly on retailer shelves. “We’re still expecting some shortages in December,” revealed Harrison. “So even though we’ll be selling everything we can get, we’ll continue full-blast with our outreach through PR, and through paid advertising and other things.”

This isn’t the first time Nintendo has warned the public of potential supply shortfalls, as the company’s American president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a previous story that “it is still going to be difficult to get your hands on the Wii” this holiday season.

The Wii isn’t the only system that Nintendo is selling with super impressive numbers – the DS handheld is just behind the Wii in monthly sales in the U.S. “For DS, we think there’s still a huge amount of potential left. We’re barely at half of the life-to-date sales that we achieved on our last generation of Game Boy,” Harrison added.

The Wii and DS are the top two selling consoles in the U.S. throughout October, selling 519,000 and 458,000 units.

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RE: The Real Shortage

By inperfectdarkness on 11/20/2007 10:27:52 AM , Rating: 2

sadly, my roth fund cannot buy nintendo stock. (i'm nearly committing seppuku right now. if they're making $100 of every console x 500,000 u.s. console sales/month = OH SNAP!)

if graphics are everything, then the psp should also be outselling the ds....oh wait, it's not.

you see kids, there's plenty of "gold" from previous consoles that's still around to be played. and every week, the wii allows us to download some of those gems for the virtua console. even with 8-bit graphics, the original legend of zelda is still a great game. that's why the best rpg's of the past 10 years have all been released for GBA...imho. (ff1,2,4,5,6,golden sun, etc) you only need bombastic graphics if you're trying to disguise a turd.

the gcn could not simply be "updated" to a wii. and as previously stated, it still has a gba player...so it's going to stick around indefinately in my living room. it would also require wi-fi, a hard drive, and a host of other features. plus, we now have higher capacity disks.

i'll tell you from experience, i wasn't too keen on the control stick back in 1995. nintendo knows what they're doing. i was equally worried about the wiimote. nintendo still knows what they're doing. just because it's new to the market doesn't make it irrevelant. and just because sony and microsoft get their hands on the idea doesn't mean they'll make quality. i've yet to see even one instance where sony and microsoft combined can have a better gaming execution than 99% of the 1st party games nintendo releases. unlike nintendo, sony and microsoft usually farm out their 1st party games. to be fair, nintendo does this on a few of their titles too...but the best ones, the blockbusters, are almost exclusively in-house.

i can virtually guarantee that if the 360 was selling for $250, and the wii was still at $250, the wii would still outsell the 360. haters who think the price should drop are loony.

naysay all you want, at this rate, the wii will become the fastest, best selling, most successful console platform yet. (i say yet, because this leaves the door open for more huge success to follow).

the wii was never intended to best pc fps gaming. just appreciate that it does what it does extremely well...so well in fact; that it makes both of its competitors look stupid.

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