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Kai_Mao on 23 December 2016
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Illusion said:
SpokenTruth said:

They, like Sony and MS, do not manufacture the hardware itself.  Foxconn does.  Manufacturing for the Wii was already at a 24/7 pace with multiple lines dedicated.  To increase production even more would have required a whole new factory to be designed, approved, paid for, constructed, machinery installed, employees trained and manufacturing began.   On top of that, these devices are built from hundreds of suppliers providing components.  If one supplier is at max capacity for production, you cannot make more.

So what's more realistic to you?  Nintendo is just stupid and doesn't want to increase production to meet demand because they are stupid?  Or the costs, time and supply bottlenecks for the global distribution of a complicated device might just play a role in availability?  I sincerely hope you don't think there is a modicum of column A.  It's all a balance of costs to increase production versus returns plus costs of wharehousing if you manufacture too many (which has also happened).

I would possibly buy that in the case of the Wii simply because of the demand being far beyond anything that Nintendo had previously experienced but I do not buy this for the 3DS.  Up until this year, Nintendo had been manufacturing close to 10 million 3DS units yearly and this was the first year that Nintendo was really tapering supply.  A little bit of foresight back in July could have shown Nintendo that they could have easily sold another 8-9 million this year and I think that they could have easily contacted their suppliers and asked for a return to the previous year's shipments without a lot of extra cost (maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite 10 million but I think they could have got a lot more than 6 without the need for any new factories being set up).

The fact is that Nintendo DOES make a lot of business mistakes and you don't have to be a wallstreet exec to see them.  We wouldn't have gotten the Wii U if Nintendo knew what they were doing.  Nintendo did absolutely nothing to harness the INSANE popularity of Pokemon GO.  The one thing that they could have done was to leverage the newfound popularity of Pokemon by making Pokemon Sun/Moon a massive hype-fest, instead the wind gets taken out of their sales due to a lack of supply.  There is no way that you can convince me curtailing 3DS production in this manner was a smart business decision during a Christmas seasonwhen the Wii U is literally selling zero units.  I think that the real problem is that Nintendo is especially out of touch with their western market.  They really do not know what is popular and what is cool here and by the time they figure it out, it is already too late.

where in the world did you get that from? They shipped 10 million copies initially. Some people here thought it was TOO MUCH of a shipment. The games are selling well and I haven't read anything that shows that it is slowing down. It's a given that Pokemon sells. Why do you think the original games still sold well as physical re releases in Japan or that XY and ORAS found new life in the sales charts?