Is it just me, or does this whole Wii shortage thing seem a little fake?  I ask this not as Wii hater or whatever.  More in the sense of sales number. 

http://www.vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=All&cons2=&reg2=All&cons3=&reg3=All&start=39026&end=39439

If you look at weekly sales worldwide throughout the past year, you'll notice Wiis were selling pretty steadily for the entire year.  This entire time supposedly the Wii was having problems not being able to produce the supply to meet demand.  First problem i have with this is this:  How long does it take a company to increase production?  Its been an entire year yet they weren't able through the whole time to be able to increase their production rates?  

Second problem if have looking at the chart.  How the hell if they arent able to meet the demand for the past year, all of a sudden they are able to pushout close to 1.5 million units in a single week, or close to 4.2 million units the month before and up to christmas?  

Does anyone care to speculate as to why this is?  Is Nintendo holding back supply to make it seem the Wii is hard to find and even more desired? Are they really just having problems of meeting the demand?  Are retailers/ distributors the problem here (as i know some stores do purposely hold back their Wii, as i have 3 friends that work retail at different stores that do this, one store doesnt even let out its supply to the public, they raffle them off to employees to see who gets to buy one)  So what is everyones thoughts on this? 

This has been gone over. Nintendo increased production once in April, and another time in August. At some point, they started stockpiling (probably in August), to save for the holiday season so that during the biggest crunch time, they'd have enough units on shelves. This strategy didn't work :-p

So is isnt that not a shortage, but just Nintendo holding back on the supply?

It's a very standard retail tactic to keep at least 10% of your stock from the first part of the year back for the holiday rush. Inevitably, there are more people looking for products during the holidays than during the rest of the year, and a great deal of the ones looking during the holidays won't be willing to keep looking for them afterwards. People who go looking when it's the "off season" are more likely to be willing to keep looking, on the other hand. Ergo there's more risk of lost sales if there's no stockpile for the holidays.

inb4 leoj comez in an duz a hardcore ganzsta beyotch shittin

@ultratiddles
I thought Leo j was a sony fanboy?

prlatino86 said: Is it just me, or does this whole Wii shortage thing seem a little fake? I ask this not as Wii hater or whatever. More in the sense of sales number. http://www.vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=All&cons2=&reg2=All&cons3=&reg3=All&start=39026&end=39439 If you look at weekly sales worldwide throughout the past year, you'll notice Wiis were selling pretty steadily for the entire year. This entire time supposedly the Wii was having problems not being able to produce the supply to meet demand. First problem i have with this is this: How long does it take a company to increase production? Its been an entire year yet they weren't able through the whole time to be able to increase their production rates? Second problem if have looking at the chart. How the hell if they arent able to meet the demand for the past year, all of a sudden they are able to pushout close to 1.5 million units in a single week, or close to 4.2 million units the month before and up to christmas? Does anyone care to speculate as to why this is? Is Nintendo holding back supply to make it seem the Wii is hard to find and even more desired? Are they really just having problems of meeting the demand? Are retailers/ distributors the problem here (as i know some stores do purposely hold back their Wii, as i have 3 friends that work retail at different stores that do this, one store doesnt even let out its supply to the public, they raffle them off to employees to see who gets to buy one) So what is everyones thoughts on this?

 We have these threads like once every couple of weeks.  The Wii has been ramped up in production twice, and it is the fastest selling console ever to date, if I am not mistaken.  They do not need to hold back production in order to create a buzz; it has a buzz all of its own, and I am sure that Nintendo is not HAPPY about missing out on millions of sales over the Christmas season.  

 It's pretty real, dude.      

Nintendo doesn’t really seem to be holding back supply; they just took a lot of steps to make sure as many consoles as possible where out there for the week before Christmas.

Take a look at the American sales from two weeks ago. They sold ~173K, then last week sold 740K. Obviously supplies from the week ending the 15th were held up to make a big splash on the week before Christmas.

In terms of the overall increase lately, Nintendo said that they increased production in the summer/fall. This most recent production increase didn’t really start effecting supplies actually on the shelf until November or so (this is a normal delay for manufacturing increases). They may have stored up a few units during this while still shipping at previous levels. This would really just be holiday planning though, and not something that would create the year-round shortage we’ve seen.

The final possibility remains to be seen, and that would be shipping methods. Consoles are generally shipped from the manufacturing plant by boat. This is slow and can take a couple of weeks to get consoles on the shelf after they’re manufactured. For the holiday crunch time, it’s not unusual for a company to switch to air delivery to get products out as fast as possible. If they did do this, they could have essentially sold half of January’s supply in December, allowing them to post huge numbers for the holidays. If we see really low Wii numbers and it’s still sold out in January, this is probably why.

Early in the year production was at 1m they then increased production a couple of times and are now sitting at 1.8m per month. It takes about 6-8 months to increase production from start to finish which means somewhere around the time the decided to up production the first time they decided to increase it even more. All of this is according to Nintendo's Quarterly reports.

So yes they did increase supply significantly and they are now producing more units per month than any console ever has.

Nintendo is not holding units back to create an impression of scarcity but since the latest production increase they held up the additional Wiis produced for the necessary Xmas stockpile.

They don't need to hold back supply to give the impression to be sold out, as they are already selling more than either competitors, often more than them combined, and this alone is a really impressive feat. If they were selling the least while selling out this conspiracy theory might have some merit but the high sale numbers make it ridiculous.

However, Xmas is the biggest shopping season in many countries and a lot of people would be willing to spend $250 on a Wii that might not be willing at any other time of the year so Nintendo needed to have a lot of supply at Xmas to reach as many of these customers as possible. To that effect they kept the supply steady when the production increased and stockpiled the difference for Xmas.

If you do not believe that the Wii would still have been sold out if they had not stockpiled (in America anyway as it was not sold out in Europe since the beginning of the summer and in Japan since the end of the summer) just wait a month or two and see how Nintendo keeps being sold out in America while they sell close to 1.8 millions a month (their current production capacity, though the number might be a little lower for January depending on whether Nintendo had to airfreight some Wiis for last week's numbers instead of shipping them as such Wiis would have been on shelves either this week or next month).

Of course it might be that with the great amount of Wiis sold during the holiday season the demand might be close enough to being met that 1.8 millions a month will be enough to keep them on shelves but I do not think it will happen in early 2008, if at all this year (in America anyway).