Next-Gen has reported through an interview with Nintendo of America’s Perrin Kaplan that it may be awhile before the Wii Shortage of ’07 ends. Perrin stated that they are at maximum capacity right now in terms of manufacturing the system, but the demand for the system is still at a fever-pitch, making it very hard to keep an amble supply on store shelves. The Internet community has known about this situation for some time now, but it’s surprising to see that even Nintendo themselves can’t predict when the shortage will come to an end.
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But let’s think about this for a second. Even though the Wii is doing gangbusters right now, you can’t call it a complete success when the demand for it far exceeds supply. It isn’t good to have virtually no stock of your product on store shelves when everyone and their grandma wants one. Someone made a poor judgment call when deciding how many factories to subcontract out of (or whatever they call it these days) to make Wii’s. If they predicted more accurately, they would have foreseen this problem and made more Wii systems to begin with.
Even though the PS3 is selling like cold-cakes right now, they made sure to have enough supply for everyone that wanted one, and the ones that may just decide to pick it up at some later date. All you have to do is go to a store and pick one up. Although this looks bad to all those junior financial forecasters out there, you still can’t make money on a product if you can’t even supply it to the consumer market, and Sony apparently knows this, even if their system isn’t the most attractive piece of machinery.
But of course, it’s not that simple. If you look to VGChartz.com, you will see that the Wii has sold over 6.5 million Wii systems globally in the five months it’s been available. That is just a huge number, any way you see it. Nintendo may not be making enough, but they sure as hell made a lot of Wii’s already. So it may have been an issue where it would have taken a lot of money and time to even get the manufacturing process to produce the amount of Wii’s that the laws of Supply and Demand called for. Possibly more money than Nintendo may have wanted to use for the system at this point. And remember, Nintendo has to think about 3 major territories: North America, Europe, and Japan, with all those little guys in between, like Australia. It gets very hard to decide what country to give supply to.
But whatever it is, Nintendo is losing some ground here. If it’s gonna take months for any Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabaloo to go and pick one up, there may be occurrences where these people will just give up and buy a PS3 or 360. Nintendo hasn’t been in this kind of position since the SNES days, and it would be a huge mistake if they let it pass them by. They have to get back on the ball with the supply.
Do some of you think it’s too late for Nintendo? Did the gravy train leave the station already, or is the Wii gonna keep this “I need one. NOW!” trend up until Nintendo meets demand? I like to think I know more than everyone else in the world, but in this case, even I’m stumped. The Wii has already surpassed my expectations in this regard (I mean, this shit never happened with the GameCube), so I can’t even fathom a guess as to what happens next. Is it the beginning of the end for Nintendo, or the middle of the…. You know what I mean.