Nintendo Refutes Wii Shortage

Nintendo has responded to accusations leveled against it earlier this week by GameStop, saying that Wii shortages are due to demand. Nintendo's George Harrison told Next-Gen.biz in a phone interview that "That's not at all the case. We have worldwide territories that are all competing over the available production. The Japan and European markets are doing extremely well with the Wii. People in Japan at NCL [Nintendo Co. Ltd.] are making the best decisions that they can about which products get shipped to which market and when." An EU marketing director is also quoted at GamesIndustry.biz responding to criticism about the lack of new Wii titles, as well as the supply shortage. Nintendo's Laurent Fischer asserts that the company has a 'release it when it's ready' attitude, and that they'll release products when they meet the company's standards.

We still have lines...

[Cyno01]

I work in retail, in the electronics dept, we get at least 10 calls a day and as many people stopping in asking about the wii. We get shipments in randomly and sporadically. We got 12 in on tuesday and sold the 4 we could in less than an hour. The other 8 we had to hold because our weekly flyer promised a minimum of 8 per store on sunday. So this week i've told at least 50 people that if they want one of those 8 Wiis to be at the store when we open at 7 on sunday. Its like that every 3 weeks or so when the Wii gets advertised, people lining up at 5 in the morning. Meanwhile we have more than a dozen PS3s upstairs that we cant sell. We had less, but then people returned some...

I'm personally very happy with my Wii, got it at launch, only had to wait in line about 10 hours, and that was lots of fun, everybody had DS' and booze. Only my second console and the first one i've bought new. Im somewhat dissapointed with the lineup so far, but im looking forward to super paper mario and mario party 8 (as well as SSBB and Metroid), and im sure it will get better. I have spent quite a bit on virtual console game, and those are keeping me occupied. Since i never owned any of those systems, its not a bad deal for me.

I am considering maybe getting a 360 though, mostly because i know as much fun as the wii is, we're not gonna see games like Gears of War, Lost Planet, Crackdown, GRAW2, etc on it (not to mention Fable 2, KotOR 3 etc). I was considering getting a PS2 for a while, but i hate sony with a passion and Guitar Hero is coming out for 360 next week, so theres not much need now. The only thing off the top of my head that i still want to play on PS2 is katamari.

Re:definitely holding back production

[AvitarX]

It took twice as long for the X360 to sell where the Wii is now. I hardly would call that getting their act together.

Nintendo was doing better at the end of December than Xbox did at the end of March.

Nintendo has had something like this before. Shortages on massivly selling items reaping them massive net income.

The only console that was doing this well at 4 months in the US was the N64 (I only looked at the US market) and it was a stagered launch so it is not quite the same thing.

Nintendohas produced a massive amount of Wiis, more than any other console at this point in its life (I am making this as an assumption, but would bet at least 4:1 on it).