I'm a Nintendo fan and I agree that this is ridiculous. Speaking as the poor sorry asshole who spent months Wii-hunting for friends, Nintendo can't produce worth crap.

Last December, along with the Wii being sold out, do you realize the DSL was also sold out everywhere, and Nintendo had an 8 month head start with it to ramp up manufacturing?

Nintendo has no clue how to produce enough hardware, period. It might be because they're so unused to selling a product that people actually want, but if the Wii still can't stay on shelves for two years in a row, then it's not JUST demand, it's incompetence. 

 I figured Nintendo would actually have enough of them on store shelves by now. Oops... 

You know, at this point, I would not be surprised if Nintendo is stockpiling about 50% of what they're producing for Oct. through December. While I am not familiar at all with the process to start up factories, we do know that they are ramping up production without ramping up supplies to retailers (at least not to my eyes).

At this point, they may have just ramped up production by huge numbers, and all of those units are being held back for big games + the holidays. I don't feel that them remaining sold out now is that representative of what the scenario will be like in the holidays, when they may have huge numbers to ship.

At the same time, I am glad that a Gamestop employee took pity on me and hid a wii in the back a while ago (against company policy), because I would totally still be looking for one if he hadn't. And I would not be looking forward to trying to find one this holiday season, because even with the huge numbers I expect Nintendo to ship, I don't think it could ever be enough. I've seen viruses with a slower infection rate than the Wii.

I still think they have a deliberate shortage. Why Not? They keep saying that it is selling out, and people gain interest because it is so hard to find. They are stockpiling. It is a short term loss to keep the momentum going for the rest of the generation.

This is a given. Just for everyone's information, Holidays usually raise demand for a product. The problem with this one is that Wii was hard to find last holiday, parents have saved up, and now those not to have gotten one last year are going to try to get one this year thinking it will be easy to find, but what they do not know is that Wii has been sold out ever since. Those buying Wii's right now are not parents for their kids moreso than people who feel they HAVE to have it in their homes and cannot wait to get it as a Christmas gifts, with a few birthdays thrown in there I'm sure. The demand for Wii is at the next level and it will only grow and compound.

(This post was a mishap.  I think I did the same thing as Alexie Di Onie further up the page.  Where is the delete button when you need it?  :-p)

If the PS3 would sell like shit, if it was 250$, you may ask that why it isn't then 250$? Maybe Sony isn't so interested in bringing fun'n games (and BD players) to the public, as they are with companys profit?

Ramping up production isn't easy to do, especially whem first production increase before Wiis release. Basically Nintendo may be at the moment in a situation, where the (Wiis) assembler (or someone in the supply chain) may have to put up another factory. Nintendo increased production earlier, by making a contract with another manufacturer, so that there are more than one company, who manufactures Wiis. Anyway, it usually takes months to increase production, if even one production line is needed to that increase. And didn't Nintendo say in march/april, that they ramp production up again in the summer?

VC games can be stored a) Wiis internal flash, b) SD card, c) to the VC server (you can DL purchased item as many times as you want to, with no need to pay it again).
Wii has 512 MB of flash memory (biggest games in data size, were OoT and RE2, with 64MB cartriges), and yes, it stores data in blocks, just like any other data system.

The competition better hope that the Wii is hard to find these holidays or else we may see quite a gap established between the Wii and its peers.

 That is a pretty ignorant thing to say for a numberof reasons, A. Nintendo slowed down production of the DS so that they could create more Wii's, how do I know this? Working at a Gamestop we stopped getting shipments of DS's in october and we learned that this was because of ramped up Wii creation. B. It is also ignorant because we didnt have a problem with them shipping us less DS's because we had 160 plus stockpiled in the back room. By Mid November they were all gone, you don't expect that kinda thing to happen and you certainly dont think that you will sell that many Ds's so quickly, I work in a small store as well, so having 160+ DS's was overkill, yet we were still sold out in such a short period of time. Nintendo did everything they could to get their product to the consumer. It wasnt incompetance by any stretch of the imagination. So don't assume anything unless you have anything to back up your far fetched assumptions. Nintendo's been in the business 20+ years, they arent incompetent.