Why You Can't Find a Wii for Christmas

Nintendo is making Wii consoles at a record pace, some 1.8 million a month. Last week they sold 350,000 units. Yes, just last week. And yet, still, it's going to be almost impossible to find a Wii in a store this Christmas. Wired reports that the problem actually began back in August. Summer being the traditional 'dry' season in gaming usually leads to hardware surpluses, but not with Nintendo's console. The result is a holiday season that Nintendo essentially couldn't prepare for. "Demand for Wii is so high, says analyst Michael Pachter, because of all the different types of consumers competing for the units ... it's not just kids who crave Wii. [It's] an especially big hit at retirement homes ... Hard-core gamers, who initially spurned the Wii's lower graphic power compared to the Xbox and PlayStation 3, have changed their tune on the console, thanks to brilliant software like the first-person shooter Metroid Prime 3. And eBay scalpers? They really want Wii." In fact, the only reliable way to get your hands on a Wii is to go that most dubious of routes. Ebay Wii sales are very brisk indeed this week.

Dear the rest of the world...

Welcome to last year.

Trust me, I'll be able to find a Wii come Christmas Morning. It'll be exactly where I put it a year ago.

Re:Dear the rest of the world...

Wow, I've never seen so much smug in a single post outside of a Prius owner's forum. Does it hurt?

Smug Humor (Re:Dear the rest of the world...)

Try this on for size :)

I have THREE PS3s. [youtube.com]

Good stuff...

Re:Dear the rest of the world...

You must be new here - welcome! Are you familiar with all sections [slashdot.org] of Slashdot?

It's really small.

Really, really small. And quite cheap.

If it becomes too hard to find, just go to a friend's house and take his.

Leaving the money where the Wii was, is regarded as a nice touch.

HOW TO FIND A WII IN THE US

I've helped over 2 dozen people find wiis since launch (i got mine at midnight, so I was good), and I'll tell you all the same thing I've told them:

Check the weekly ads for Target and Best Buy on their respective websites on Saturday night/Sunday Morning. If there's a Wii in the Best Buy ad, go there immediately (sunday morning), they'll be there (ask if they're not on shelves, they may have not been stocked yet). If it's in the target ad, go to the store and ask the person working in electronics when they usually get their shipments in (day of the week). You should be good to get one if you get there before 10am that day.

No Mom, It's MY Wii

My mom got me a Wii for my birthday, and she has all but come out and said that she wants it back. She threatened to buy her own if I didn't bring mine for Thanksgiving (in retrospect I should have called her bluff). My aunts and uncles went absolutely nuts over Wii Sports Boxing. In 33 years I've never seen them get so worked up over any kind of game, much less heard them yelling and shrieking like they were. So yeah, I'd say that they're going to be hard to find. My mom hates consoles in general, but she'd really like a Wii.

Remember the storeis 4 months ago?

Ever since the Wii came out, Sony, etc. have always been saying "it's all hype, it will go away in a few months."

I remember a Slasdot story about 4 months ago that basically said the Wii had peaked, that all the non-gamers that wanted one had bought it already, and it was sitting unused, while the gamers did not want one.

What crap.

Sony etc. are still caught in the "better chip/video, at any cost" model. Nintendo got it right, the video is more than good enough at the low end. It will take another revolution in video quality to make the best chips worth it again. For now, better games and better controllers are where it is at.

Why you can't find one NOW

Is because of Super Mario Galaxy. It's quite possibly the best Nintendo has come up with in ages, and it's selling consoles on the double by itself. In the last four weeks (according to vgchartz.com), the Wii has sold 280k, 265k, 435k, 640k units world wide. Add that up for a total of 1620k units in a month. When we know they're producing 1800k units/month, that basicly means there's almost nothing being stockpiled for Christmas. And the console market just explodes by Christmas...

Re:The math?

I'd assume that's worldwide production and the sales figure is US.

From one of the article links:

Nintendo's 350,000 Wii systems represent the highest one-week U.S. sales total outside of its launch week one year ago.

So yes, that's US sales.
From another article link:

We're at a rate now worldwide of about 1.8 million Wiis produced every month

So yes, that worldwide production.

In fact:

About 40 percent of Wii sales have been in America

So the US only gets 720,000/month, so the 350,000 sold was two weeks' worth, sold in one week (presumably followed by a week of nearly no sales until the next deliveries). As a rough estimate, that means that Nintendo's Wii production is about half what the demand is. And because of this:

It takes about five months for us to increase the actual monthly rate of production

...it's not going to get any better before Christmas.

GUARENTEED WAY... NOT EBAY TO GET ONE

In NYC, and I'll bet this is true in LA, there is a Nintendo World store. They sell 300 Wiis every day to the first 300 people in line. I got one for myself last year this way, and one for my nephews; they're old enough this year to ask for one. The catch, you have to get in line early; 2 hours and rising; even though the store opens at 9am.

This is the only way I know of. I hope this helps.

By the way, the Nintendo World store in Manhattan is in Rockefeller Center.

Re:GUARENTEED WAY... NOT EBAY TO GET ONE

There is only one Nintendo World store in the entire US. Thank your lucky star you live in the NYC metro area.

Re:The math?

Maybe you should check this [snopes.com] out.

Anecdote isn't evidence, and your friends in retail don't know what they are talking about.

Re:The math?

The "busiest shopping day" is not a "per store" statistic. I'm sure that at the bikini store, it's probably around Memorial Day. That's irrelevant, particularly at the scale that this discussion is about. Please, please, please: learn to be wary of anecdotal reasoning.

But my friend, the bikini store owner, says....

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

Me? I'll wait a couple of months after Xmas and buy a Wii

thats what people said last year too.

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

You broke the needle on my 'smug elitist' detector.

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

You're wrong about one key point; they are not creating an artificial demand. They are running at full capacity and believe me, they'd sell more if they could. Maybe last year you could make this claim, but they are losing sales to MS and Sony because they can't keep units stocked. It's a nice conspiracy theory, but like most, only sounds good when you don't apply logic or look deeply into the issues :) Throw in a Sheeple, and you're 90% troll! (And Maybe I just got trolled!)

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

The Wii is the fastest selling console in history, and is currently selling at about four times the rate of the Xbox 360. Is it that hard to believe that sales are genuinely exceeding expectations? Certainly at launch time, very few of the pundits or fanboys were seriously predicting sales of this magnitude. Also, Nintendo has been increasing production significantly - from 1M to 1.8M per month. That doesn't exactly lend credibility to your theory that the shortage is completely artificial.

Besides, do you really think Nintendo was equipped to predict the Wii's popularity in new markets, such as retirement homes? I simply don't see any way that demand hasn't far exceeded Nintendo's expectations.

An artificial shortage would only help Nintendo if it enabled them to sell more consoles in the long run or if it enabled them to jack up prices. They obviously aren't going to increase the price, so how might an artificial shortage still lead to increased sales in the long run? Earlier in the year, it would have been reasonable to say that they wanted to wait until there were some solid games out, but with the hype about Super Mario Galaxy, it seems pretty clear that that time is over. So, if Nintendo is capable of making significant production increases, why wait?

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

No. I just think Nintendo have done far more to make fun interesting games than Microsoft or Sony have.

Plus I've never bought a music CD protected by a Nintendo rootkit or stayed up into the small hours reinstalling Nintendo Windows XP on a relative's PC because of viruses and spyware. :-)

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

Yeah, because it was such a *bad* thing that they tried to reign in developers so that we wouldn't have another Atari-esque debacle, with a deluge of terrible uninspired games to bury the few gems in a confusing mess that caused that whole video game crash thing.

And yeah, telling developers that they could only release X number of titles per year was such an awful thing, because then it forced them to at least *try* to make a quality product, rather than assigning a single programmer the task of creating a video game -- and giving him a couple weeks to do it before it shipped. (ET anyone?)

As for censorship, the only 2 titles I know of that Nintendo actively censored were Mortal Kombat and Wolfenstein 3D. In the NES era there were pictures of Hitler's exploding head, implied sex, and plenty of other stuff. By the end of the SNES era, the blood was right back in MK2. And honestly I can't fault Nintendo for trying to avoid controversy with parents/religious groups because we all know how much worse those people are than some idiot gamers whining that they can't see blood or nazi symbols.

Their tactics were definitely heavy-handed, but you failed to mention the *one* thing that they really should be called on, and that was their dealing with retailers. They did everything they could to keep competitors products off the shelves.

And give an example of Nintendo being "bad" now...? Yeah, they shut down some pirate sites. That doesn't seem to bad to me. Yeah, they did go after some flash cart makers, and while that definitely sucks, the flash carts were primarily being sold as a piracy tool (spare me the homebrew argument, I know it all and that's why I think it sucks that they were shut down) so I can't really fault them for that.

Here's what Nintendo hasn't done: they haven't paid off developers for exclusives. They haven't sold consoles at a loss to try to buy their way into a new market. They haven't completely sold out and commercialized every aspect of my favorite hobby. They didn't help EA become the behemoth it is by helping them sell millions of cheap disc-based copies of Madden every year to idiot frat boys. They also haven't ever insulted me by saying that I should be willing to go take a second job to afford their game console, or reneged on a "$1200 per PS3 in the wild" deal made by one of their top execs. They've never released misleading hardware specifications (60 million! polygons per second! (unlit, untextured, single-pixel triangles on a single triangle strip)) or reported consoles/games shipped rather than sold.

So yeah, I'll defend them as one of the good guys. I can overlook some poor decisions in the 90s and a couple anticompetitive practices from the 80s. Besides, Sony is the poor decision maker lately, and Microsoft has a whole history of anticompetitive practices that continue today.

--Jeremy

Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple

I don't think the initial flurry of wiimote-powered titles was really anything to be proud of. The majority of them were rushed games that were little more than tech demos. Not even good tech demos. I think that the really good titles are still on the way. Nintendo's games (and a few others, like the RE4 port) prove that Red Steel is not a good example of what's possible on the system.

As for worrying about Nintendo's ability to keep producing, well, I wouldn't. I've had some issues with a few of the more recent Zelda games (Mask, Waker and Hourglass all had a horrifying amount of repetition) their other franchises are still getting better and better, in my estimation.

You can use the word 'rehash' but I think that's pretty unfair. What does it even mean? I always see it used in regards to things like the Mario series, which maintains a cast of characters and a tone, but each game brings something new to the table. People use the derogatoty word 'rehash' to describe this, whereas the same people have no such term for, say, the Halo series, where the gameplay of all three is nearly identical.

I realize that there's probably not a single company in the world that reuses IP as much as Nintendo, but I can't help but think "bullshit" when I see or hear somebody comment that they don't want to play another game with Mario in it. Does that specific set of polygons and textures actually make the gameplay less fun for some people? I might as well say that I'm tired of playing games with AK-47's. Or, if you want to stick to the playable characters, soldiers.

Two paragraph rant that hinges on a single word in original post: over.

Re:eBay Effect

"The employees in the stores get first dibs on the consoles when they come in, so they buy up most of them and sell them on eBay for big profit."

That's possible, but not necessarily true. The retailer I worked at would have forbidden that. If high demand items were in low supply, we weren't allowed to buy them. I know the same was also true for the EB that was down the street. Those stores didn't want that reputation.

Re:eBay Effect

You're right! Your anecdotal evidence totally trumps that other guy's anecdotal evidence!

Go you!

Re:Shortage should not affect most slashdotters

When I decided to by mine, I just set up a script that checked Amazon every minute or two.

I'm doing the same thing for Duke Nukem Forever - no sign of it yet though.

Re:Not Indicative

Two answers- either they have a stockpile (not likely considering stores have been empty for almsot a year) - OR - they DIDN'T sell 350 000 units in the previous weeks.

Or maybe, just maybe, Nintendo knows November is a great month in North-America compared to Europe or Japan, and they decided to ship a little more to the US and a little less everywhere else for that month. I think the US is about the only (big) country to massively buy and give gifts in November, most of the world waits till December.