Before the Wii launch in 2006, I remember GameStop being one of the few stores accepting pre-orders on the hardware. Even then, each store only took a few, leaving most interested consumers scrambling.

I wasn’t one of the people with a GameStop reserve. I’m not a big fan of the chain, and decided to take my chances. The eve before the Wii’s release I kept checking my local Best Buy store every two hours to see if a line was forming. I wasn’t going to get screwed out of a Nintendo console launch, and decided I’d get out there as soon as I had to.

Around 11:00 a.m. a line started to form. It was then that I pulled in the parking lot and sat down, the eighth person in line. The store wasn’t opening until 8:00 a.m. the following day. I had a chair and settled in.

As the time went by, that line kept getting longer until it eventually wrapped around the side of the building. Something around 100 people were in that line. The level of hype in that parking lot was pretty high. All night, people would come by to see if they could join the line. People would frantically ask everyone if they were getting a Wii to figure out if the store was going to have enough units. Even in the early morning, people were jumping in line hoping they could get one, but knowing they probably wouldn’t.

I expected something similar the other night during the Wii U launch. To my shock, it was a vastly different experience. I went to the same store and not one person was in the line at 8:00 p.m. I pre-ordered this time, so I didn’t have to camp out. I just stopped by to make sure they had my unit on hold.

I then arrived at the same store an hour before it opened. I joined as the seventh person in the line, and asked a Best Buy employee how many units they had. I was told the store had 10 Deluxe units reserved and 10 to sell to anyone else. Additionally, the store rep told me they only had eight Basic sets to sell.

What I found shocking about this was that recently we heard that there would be many more Wii U units at launch than there had been Wiis, and that same store had 80 Wii consoles to sell on launch day.

By the time the store opened, maybe 15 people were in line. The excitement wasn’t nearly as high as it was back in 2006, even though I was personally more hyped for the Wii U launch.

I had time to ponder why things were so different this time around, and have concluded it is most likely due to a number of factors. For starters, more stores were taking pre-orders this time around, why camp out when you’re secure? The down economy may have also played a part; people may not have as much to spend on a new console. The final reason I could come up with was that more people may have ordered online, since shopping over the Internet has clearly gone up since the Wii came out in 2006.

Overall, the Wii U launch was vastly different. I wonder if the days of massive launch day camp outs at nearly every major store are over.

With that said, I’d still love to hear from some readers on this topic. Did you attend both a Wii and Wii U launch? Let me know if anything was different for you.