How is Wii availability?

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: erwos
It's not that they're withholding supply - it's that they're shipping them to places with strong currency. When the Wii first came out, that was Japan and Europe. Now it's Japan and the USA.

This. The "supply" problem seemed to mostly be a North America (well, maybe just US) thing. While we were struggling, other places seemed to be stocked pretty well.

And you could argue Nintendo artificially limited it by not build more factories or contracting out.. but that's a business decision to profit. That's the only spin I could buy for the "artificial" demand. But is it artificial limiting if they are at near max capacity at their current factories?

One thing I'm curious is how much ebayers played into the availability in heavy metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a reliable way to figure that one out.

 

[SpiderWiz]

I have seen Wii just about every store lately. Nintendo has always limited the supplies. ALWAYS!!!! Same issue happen back with the NES and SNES.

 

[purbeast0]

Originally posted by: tk149
If the Wii were a standalone product, then I'd say it might be possible that Nintendo is intentionally restricting supply.

But the Wii is not a standalone product. In fact, a lot of the money Nintendo makes is from sales of licensed games and accessories.

What makes the Wii popular? Games.

How does Nintendo ensure that more games are made for the Wii? By selling more Wiis, which shows software developers that there's a bigger market for their games.

More games available means more people buy Wiis. It's a positive feedback loop.

Nintendo's last console, the Gamecube didn't sell as well as they hoped because they couldn't get enough 3rd party developers. Nintendo must have figured this out by now.

3rd party game sales aren't exactly selling great on the Wii either, even though there are 10+ million of them out there, regardless of how many 3rd party developers are developing for the wii.

 

[tk149]

Originally posted by: purbeast0

Originally posted by: tk149
If the Wii were a standalone product, then I'd say it might be possible that Nintendo is intentionally restricting supply.

But the Wii is not a standalone product. In fact, a lot of the money Nintendo makes is from sales of licensed games and accessories.

What makes the Wii popular? Games.

How does Nintendo ensure that more games are made for the Wii? By selling more Wiis, which shows software developers that there's a bigger market for their games.

More games available means more people buy Wiis. It's a positive feedback loop.

Nintendo's last console, the Gamecube didn't sell as well as they hoped because they couldn't get enough 3rd party developers. Nintendo must have figured this out by now.

3rd party game sales aren't exactly selling great on the Wii either, even though there are 10+ million of them out there, regardless of how many 3rd party developers are developing for the wii.

True, but most 3rd party games are shovelware.

I'm just going to pull some numbers out of thin air for this very simplified example.
Let's say that there are 10 Million Wii's, 5 Million 360's, and 3 Million PS3's out there.
A developer decides he wants to sell at least 1 million units of his new game. He only has to sell to 10% of Wii owners, 20% of 360 owners, or 33% of PS3 owners to achieve his goal. Factor in the devkit costs, and the fact that the Wii uses the same language as the Gamecube (so it's well-known and easy to squeeze performance out of). Which console do you think he will program for?

So even if Nintendo 1st-party games capture 90% of the market, the developer still stands a good chance of meeting his sales goal.

I don't expect to see "great" 3rd-party games hit the Wii market until late 2009. The reason is because NOBODY anticipated how well the Wii would sell until after it was released, and I'll bet that most of the best developers didn't even have a Wii game in development at the time. This assumes a 3-year game development cycle.