There is an oft repeated comment in this forum and elsewhere that nobody expected the Wii to do so well, not even Nintendo. Supposedly Nintendo was only shooting for GC type success, and were themselves blindsided by their own success.

Anyone who thinks this is missing how blantently obvious it is that Nintendo knew it and was ready for it.  They sold 5 million consoles in the first three months. While everyone agrees that that is crazy good sales, most people miss that no other console in history has had 5 million units available to sell.

So to say Nintendo was not expecting a huge success would be to say that they created more capacity and more units than any other console launch in history, with the expectation said units would take a whole year to sell (GC took a year to hit 5mil). And keep in mind this is Nintendo, the company that always is so cautious; if they had five million consoles for the first three months they probably knew that ten million could have been sold.

They had them ready, but not to sell them in 3 months. I don't think they were planning on selling them that fast, that was a good amount to have as a surplus. So they basically didn't know how the public would react.

Ninty looked at the success of the DS for their predictions, everyone else looked at the failure of the GC

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050314_2243_tc121.htm

"Whether Nintendo is a winner or loser on Revolution totally depends on how our customers react to it, and since they do not know much about it, I can't respond. A year or two from now, it will be interesting to know who ultimately made the right choices. I'm confident we have made the right decisions. "

http://cube.ign.com/articles/636/636350p1.html

"Well, of course, the idea is that the Revolution will sell and sell and sell so it becomes the standard in the industry," Iwata mused.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/698/698588p1.html

"Yes, we have already disrupted handheld and it worked. Yes, we have already disrupted Wi-Fi and it worked. We disrupted the very definition of a game and that is working, too. In a few weeks, you will better understand how to disrupt console gaming. You will play, and you will see."

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/exclusive-interview-satoru-iwata/68962/?biz=1

"About 20 years ago when Super Mario Bros. hit the market, it was just the time when people were getting very interested in video games. And when one player is playing with a Super Mario Brother... and as soon as the player makes [a mistake and loses his turn] others say, "Ok, let me try. I really want to do that." But now when some players are playing with a video game, and there are some people surrounding them, even though the player himself or herself might say, "Why don't you do that?" The surrounding people say, "No I cannot do that; that's not for me." But with games like Tennis I think that we can change that situation. When people see somebody playing with Tennis, I believe other people immediately can understand what the player is supposed to do and say, "Let me try it.

"So I think that kind of situation is really encouraging in order to expand the gaming population."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&refer=asia&sid=a0kklJ1sNgDI

"The features may help the company win customers faster than its current offering, the Nintendo DS portable player, Iwata said on Sept. 14 in Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo. ``If we can do this, the Wii could break all the boundaries in terms of user rates for game consoles,'' he said. "
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In conclusion: I disagree.

It's called creating a false demand. It gets people wanting the system more and more because they keep hearing it's getting sold out, meaning it might be quite popular and stuff. Ya dig bro?

After what noname2200 and RolStoppable posted, I too am now in the mood to disagree. :P

 While they certainly expeted it to be potentially huge the level of success was clearly not expected. The fact that they have taken so long to increase the production to 2.4 million is proof they were not expeting this level of demand. Expecting a large demand and expecting demand as large as it was are different.

 Then why are they only trying it in one market? The Wii should be sold out in both Japan and Europe if they were attempting that strategy but that is clearly not true.

They did expected to succeed, just like many other developers.

Except they didn't expected it to be THAT fast.

This basically sums it up, I believe.

RolStoppable said: Gnizmo, why are you doing this? You are giving him cheap points.

 To increase your hate of me and make it back into the top ten at least.