Darklich13: Nintendo said they believe that each time a person goes to a store looking for a Wii and can't find one, it is a possible lost sale. Realistically, you could probably come up with a formula saying, "Nintendo loses 0.25x" where 'x' is the number of people who try to buy the Wii and can't because it is sold out. Some of them *will* give up permanently due to buying a different console or losing interest, etc.
Nintendo considers these shortages very costly! They sure as hell don't want to see their business go to their competitors. And they sure as hell won't be piling these units up in a warehouse somewhere while they lose sales.
The problem is unprecedented demand. No system has ever had this kind of demand, and Nintendo hasn't had any sort of stock bubble where they could afford to take a factory down for improvements or get additional capacity. Typically, you get fairly large stock bubbles when producing consoles, because you produce at a constant rate greater than your rate of sales. Nintendo does this with the DS, Sony with the PS3, Microsoft with the Xbox 360.
Nintendo may have a problem this holiday season meeting demand for both the DS and the Wii. What a shame!
The point is that Nintendo *is* producing more units. Twice as many per month as they did in 2006. Nintendo has tried to increase production many times and publically stated that they've had trouble increasing production for whatever reason. You can say, "oh, but the Wii is simple." Do you know what isn't simple? Producing millions of units per month.
To put it in perspective, Nintendo just increased production again. Look at this:
Current Wii Production: 1.8 million units per month
Current DS-lite production: 2.5 million units per month
Highest single-month of GBA production: 2.3 million units
Consider that the GBA only reached a production rate of 2.3 million units for a single month! And people considered the GBA to be an absolute monster in its heyday.
