Nintendo Sandbagging the Wii

[Final-Fan]

This may be retreading ground earlier posts have covered, but I think I have some original commentary here too, so:

mrstickball said:
The Playstation 2, in a 3 month period, October 2001-December 2001 (it's first full Christmas worldwide, having launched in Feb/Mar 2000 in Japan alone), shipped 8.07 million hardware units, according to VGC.

The Wii, for comparison has sold/shipped 3.2m units in the same period.

The Wii is nowhere near the PS2's first full Christmas....By a long shot. It has another month, but there's no way it'll sell 5m units in December alone. Most likely, it'll sell *around* 3m to 4m units, max, for a grand total of 6.2-7.2m units. Well under PS2's 01 Christmas of 8.07m units.

The issue is that the Playstation 2 knew that sales would be incredible, and had the manufacturing in place for huge prodiction of the system. The Wii doesn't have that ability.

This PS2 comparison is somewhat bogus due to the fact that the PS2 had much more time to ramp up production before its second Christmas.

"complicated hardware" is absolutely, positively no excuse. The Xbox 360, for all it's "new technology" and hundreds of component makers was churning out 30,000 Xbox 360's within 2 months of sale, per day, and MS could of done whatever they needed to get a few more factories online (however, sales started to drop slowly, so MS never needed it).

30,000 units per day in a 31-day month is 930,000 units. Wasn't the Wii producing 1 million per month at that point in its own lifetime? Or was it 1.2 million? Saying MS "could have" forced a large increase in production is just another way of saying that MS doesn't mind throwing huge piles of money at a problem. We know that, and we know Nintendo doesn't like to do that.

It entirely comes down to the fact that to broker the deals, Nintendo would have to actually........Invest money. Something they don't like to do (the Wii was one of their lowest budget R&D'ed systems thus far). Parting with alot of cash isn't Nintendo's game. They only have so much of it, and unlike MS/Sony, they don't have 10 other ventures of which to draw funds from if need be.

So Nintendo would rather let supply suffer than go through the hoops of opening up a few new factories. Trust me, there are probably dozens of plants that would LOVE to retool for Nintendo. But it takes alot of cash to procure new plants, new chip makers, and increase industrial capacity. And Nintendo doesn't want to do that. They aren't in a position to where they believe that sales will decrease, and the need of sales aren't ultra-critical right now, in their minds.

IMO, it's stupid of Nintendo to only increase production by *around* 50% in 1 year, when each system sells at a profit, and you can't produce enough of them. They do the same stupid thing with their DS carts. But hey, Nintendo can do whatever they want. I don't buy their products, so it's not my right to complain.

Isn't Nintendo producing 1.8 million units now? So it was 1.2 million after all. Why is production pathetic again? Oh right, because it didn't sink enough billions of dollars into massive hardware contracts while everyone was screaming "Wii is a fad" at the top of their Internet lungs. Nintendo's lack of foresight is truly appalling.