Yes, they have plenty of money. But their prestige is on the line, and Iwata has basically put his position on the line to guarentee a certain profitability. It's not as simple as just absorbing the losses.

If they issue a price cut, they'll lose a lot of face, since they publically stated there wasn't one in the forseeable future. The games are coming, but history has shown that games alone do not cause long-term sales growth. Marketing has been a disaster from the start.

Suspending production is not the same thing as discontinuing. It'd mean they would shut down their production until their excess had been sold, then resuming. True, the Dreamcast was suspended, then discontinued, but the Gamecube was suspended, then continued. It's good business, but really bad press.

2003, I believe. Their shipment numbers for the first half of the year were, frankly, catastrophic.

It's happened before. They had to suspend Gamecube production (temporarily, I believe) less than two years after launch. Granted, the sales slump then was far, far worse than now, but it did happen.

You have a point that they may have accounted for this. However, even if that were true, and assuming that Nintendo's initial sales estimate was a sales target, they produced, at a minimum, 5.5 million units during the launch window, which means, at this moment, they have around 2 million consoles, mimimum, they haven't sold. I'd say a more realistic estimate would be 2.5 million unsold.

I would say that your estimations post-summer might be over-optimistic, but we'll just have to wait and see. However, even if they cut production down to minimum, that's only 100,000 units per month, across all of their production lines. If those lines have a capacity 8-10 times that, I doubt the production companies in question will let Nintendo tie their lines up for so little production. They may not have to stop all of them, but they'd almost certainly have to stop some of them.

Mario Kart Wii. Almost 35 million copies sold worldwide. Became the best selling racing game of all time.

Mario Kart 7. Revitalized public interest in the 3DS. Without this, 3DS would'nt have been a success even with a price cut.

Mario Kart U. If bundled with all Wii U SKUs with price drop this Holiday, R.I.P. XboxOne and PS4.

i REALLY think you should change the title, it smells moderation

Winter 2001 is when it launched, early 2003 is when they temporary ceased production

LOL.

In what way?

Hmm?

I'd hate to think so.  I know very little regarding the realities of hardware production, and I was wondering at what point, if such a point exists, Nintendo would have to suspend production to let demand catch up to supply.

Suspending production will only make the situation look worse. It would make consumers, publishers and stockholders very uneasy about the Wii U and possibly destroy any chance of it regaining momentum. Nintendo has something up their sleeve and I don't think they are going to suspend production until they lay everything out.