Why You Can't Find a Wii for Christmas 450
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.
The math? (Score:2, Insightful)
350,000 sold x 4 (weeks per month) = 1.4million sold per month
They make 1.8 million a month.
If they're making more than they're selling, why is it so hard to find a console?
Re:The math? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Indicative (Score:4, Insightful)
350 000 sold last week
Now, think about that, if every week they sold 350 000, and they only made 150 000, how did they find the extra 200 000.
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.
Now, could we in future post articles which aren't based on freak statistics and make out those results are normal.
Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Amount being made != Amount shipped to retailer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not Indicative (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Remember the storeis 4 months ago? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:eBay Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Why you can't find one NOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The math? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's all about over-hype and sheeple (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's all about over-hype and sheeple (Score:3, Insightful)
I did forget about Gran Turismo. But my point is Sony's been in the game industry for about 12 years now, but they've only started making much of a name for themselves in game development in the last 4 years or so. The PS3 not having much of interest doesn't help that out there either.
That's a problem with second-party developers in general. Nintendo's Mario Party games, for example, are done by Hudson Soft, a subsidiary of Konami and therefore not really a second party. Most people would say that Mario Party is a second-party game, however, due to the license.
I think the only second party to ever get much attention was Rare. I hadn't realized Mario Party wasn't done in house by Nintendo. I don't know what you'd call that relationship. Nintendo's done that a lot lately though - GBC/GBA Zeldas, GameCube/Arcade F-Zero, arcade Mario Kart. Second party usually means a developer that has an exclusive relationship with the console maker. Hudson & Nintendo don't fall into that category.