Louie on 29 November 2016
| RolStoppable said: I don't think it's possible to draw a conclusion of purposefully undershipping to create artificial demand when we don't have any numbers. Well, we do have first week sell-through for Japan which was ~250k. That doesn't look like a low allocation of the product because it isn't far off from the numbers new consoles have launched to in Japan in recent times. While we don't have numbers for other regions, I'd assume that shipments were scaled for the bigger markets. so worldwide more than a million units were ready for launch week. That isn't a small shipment in and on itself, but relative to demand it appears miniscule. Said demand is inflated by scalpers buying up preorders, but that makes it all the more difficult for Nintendo to properly judge real demand before the product goes on sale. Wii U demand was greatly inflated which ended with scalpers returning ~100k units to stores in January 2013 in the USA alone; that's systems that scalpers were sitting on for two months before they gave up on reselling them. |
Exactly. What's more is the question whether undershipping actually does "artificially increase demand" as people say it does. It's a common notion on gaming message forums but whenever I'm out there asking people who should know they say that most of the time it simply results in missed sales. Maybe that's different with a company like Nintendo that has a cult-like following. But most people will simply pass and say "no thanks, then!" if a product isn't readily available for them. The Wii ist an excpetion because that was a cultural phenomenon. tl;dr: The jury's still out on that one and we don't know if Nintendo actually makes more money by undershipping. It's doubtful at least.
