another person trying to start a flame war---look they are selling as soon as they are made--just track the numbers since its release and you will see that teh numbers ae huge--thy have not been hording its not a big conspericy or anything---if you want one drag your but out of bed around midnight and get in line like other people do----if your to lazy to do that then dont come here and complain calling it a conspericy

However, they have to produce more controllers than consoles, otherwise you wouldn't see them in stores. They also have to produce enough software for all the consoles they sell. They need factories, shipment capacity, warehouses. Above all, they need to be sure they won't overproduce or start decreasing in quality.

 Yea, but why are there still shortages then.  They should have a ton of Wii's on the shelf.  The Wii has nothing in it that is really advanced.  In fact the Wii is the only system that is making money out of the new generation systems.  Something like $50 a pop.  Nintendo should be making more to meet the demand.  Yes the damand is huge but it can be done, and they had a year to plan this holiday season out.  There should not be shortages.

No, I just want to buy a Wii. I have to vent my frustration somehow.

Well, they actually did increase the production, there was some lul during the mid-year where Wii was easier to get than now (was still hard, but not too hard). Also, the DS Lite also suffered from shortage for a period of time as well.

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. 

Darklich13 was the fastest selling console in history. Up until this point the Wii is selling at a faster rate than the PS2. The Wii production has gone from 700,000 month to 1 million a month to 1.8 million units a month. 1.8 million a month is 21.6 million units per year. The Wii has suprassed the 360's total sales in less than a year and has outsold the PS3 by a rate of near 2.5 to 1. Nintendo isn't sandbagging, the system is just selling at an insane level. The Wii is the only next gen console that has told extremely well in all three of the major markets.

For a stupid question, a stupid answer (no offense): there are shortages because demand is greater than supply. No one knows how big demand is so Nintendo has to increase supply gradually (they increased it 80% in less than a year, which is a lot already). They don't want to end up with useless factories which cost hundres of millions, or billions of dollars, to build.

Keep in mind, Nintendo has never needed to produce so many units of not one, but two systems so fast. Ever! GC only sold 22m over 5 years, Wii will pass that in just over a year. Plus DS far oldsells GBA. Nintendo is primarily a software company not a hardware company like Sony.

It's just not possible for them to suddenly increase production to 5x the original capacity. It's not even realistic.

I feel for you, I really do. The Wii is like the Bigfoot. Everyone has heard of it but most people have never put eyes on one. Unfortunately if you really want one, you'll have to line-up before the stores even open to get one. The demand will not ease off anytime soon, if ever.

Actually, Nintendo's shipments for the Wii aren't the fastest-shipping for a system on it's first full Christmas.

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. "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).

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.