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A year later, Nintendo's Wii is still tough to come by

By Matt Richtel, The New York Times

Published December 17, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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Wii is popular with a broad audience - from kids to the elderly.

Photo by Nintendo

Wii is popular with a broad audience - from kids to the elderly.

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Linda Beattie is trying desperately to pay Nintendo $250, but the company is not cooperating.

Two weeks ago, Beattie went to a video game retailer in the Bay Area in search of a Wii, Nintendo's intensely popular video game machine. She timed her visit to correspond with the arrival of a UPS truck that she had heard would be making its regular stop at the store, hoping it might deliver some consoles. She was out of luck.

So Beattie, 44, a permit expediter and not a stalker by trade, followed the truck to the next store, where it did drop off a handful of Wiis. She bought one, but store policy would not let her buy a second for a friend, so she quickly called him.

"He came from another game store that he was staking out," Beattie said. "He got there two minutes too late to buy the last one."

Shoppers across the country have similar stories. With the Wii, Nintendo has created a phenomenon that recalls crazes of Christmases past: Cabbage Patch dolls, Furby, Tickle Me Elmo. But, in this case, it is happening for a second consecutive holiday shopping season. Nintendo has been unable to keep up with demand, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in potential sales.

The Wii, which has an unusual remote control that players wave to manipulate action on the screen, has attracted a broad, unconventional gaming audience - from young children to mothers and even the elderly.

The demand for the console has prompted creative buying strategies, early-morning camp-outs and recrimination against Nintendo for failing to produce enough machines a full year after the product's release.

Jim Silver, editor in chief of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said it was unusual for an in-demand product to remain so hard to find for so long. The must-have toys of other holiday seasons, like Furby, stayed popular into a second year but became easily available.

The unsated demand is costing Nintendo more than face. Estimates from industry analysts and retailers indicate that the company, based in Kyoto, Japan, is giving up $1 billion or more in sales in the ever-important holiday retail season, not including sales of games for those unbuilt consoles.

Between the Wii's debut in November 2006 and this Sept. 30, Nintendo sold 13.1 million consoles. It ships 1.8 million a month worldwide - a third of those to North America - up from one million a month earlier this year.

"We don't feel like we've made any mistakes," said George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America.

He said there was a shortage, in part, because there was a worldwide shortage of disk drives that had hurt Nintendo and makers of many other devices.

Industry analysts suspect Nintendo is keeping the supply low to maintain a buzz.

"Nintendo is afraid that if it makes too many Wii, the boom may crest too quickly," said Masayuki Otani, an analyst at Maruwa Securities in Tokyo.

Comments

  • December 18, 2007

    1:08 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Mike_w writes:

    i work in the electronics area, (and sell the Wii) i can't blame Nintendo. the out produce x box and sony. its all numbers right

    i think the last number i saw was 580,000 a month. they open more plants there just going to have to fire people and lose the money in the long run (due to the other guys jumping on the motion capture idea, so they won't be the hottest thing out there eventually) so what sense does it make if they open another plant? in 3 years its just going to have to close down. and thats alot

    as for my store we get them in and we just grab em and stand at the front we can sell three in a half hour. ( we don't get scheduled delivery so i can't tell people when they would be in. or i would be rich)

    anyways my point? i agree with Nintendo. they cant build more factory's cause it would be to costly in the long run