*~Onna76~* said: Oops never mind

i saw that, i forgive you.

 If not a production problem, then what is causing the scarcity?

Week to week sales can fluctuate a lot because of the shortages. Shipments may not all arrive every single week, stores may hold them until Sundays (this is happening with Wii Fit).

We need to give this game a few weeks to see how shipments will really come in. I think once we have two or three more weeks of sales data for the US, we'll have a better idea of what's going on.

Is there a shortage in "others"?

Others should be receiving priority for shipments or so the theory goes since NA is currently the least profitable due to the low US $ exchange rate.

Supposedly that's the most probable reason for lower NA shipments of Wii Fit. It's the only reasonable explanation. Nothing to do with the complexity of manufacturing the balance boards (uses the same pressure sensors found in digital scales), or the logistics of shipping them from Japan or wherever it is they're being manufactured (Made in China).

Nintendo had months to prepare for the NA launch. If they saw potential problems for shipping enough units for a solid launch (not measured by 100% sell through via short supply, but by meeting initial demand), they could have delayed the launch until Fall.

But the best way to gauge NA shipments will be to just take the overall number on a month to month basis since weekly NA shipments for hardware (consoles) tends to fluctuate greatly on a week to week basis when you look at the pattern.

The NA shipments were the largest first day shipments, and it had the most sales this most recent week as well.  So what's your theory again?

130k second week sales. What's your theory?

JPN NA Other
252,510 739,598 644,865
152,840 130,067 344,616

 ... you are probably right. I WAS thinking what the Nintendo strategy would be for that wiik (eh...). Either that or it's just completely impossible for nintendo to make them fast enough.

That (1) initial shipments to North America were bigger than any other territory and (2) Stores are holding Wii fit for Sunday.  Lots of stores are doing that.

Measuring week to week is also a bad idea, as I stated, because shipments come on boats from China and two shipments could arrive in one week, or none, or three.  It's too fine of a granularity to look at numbers.

Imagine looking at day-to-day sales.  oh, Wednesday Nintendo sold 100k, but Thursday-Sunday they sold none!  In Japan, they sold units on Thursday-Sunday, and therefore they're withholding shipments from North America!

Sure, it's an exaggeration, but you get the point. 

And my words were it's best to measure sales on a month to month basis due to the erratic hardware shipping trends for the Wii in the NA region. Maybe you missed that.

Two weeks is too early to tell, but based on first to second week sales, the pattern is looking pretty familiar.

Just looking at the first two weeks of sales, according to VGC we have about 870k units shipped to NA and 990k units shipped to Others.

Unless the figures are off, it looks like priority is given to Others considering there is a larger Wii user base in the NA region (about 12m NA to 9m Others).

That is the trend I was noting.

You can re-examine your theory in another two weeks. Personally, I'm expecting to see a significantly larger NA shipment for week 3, but a lower total number for the first month relative to Others.