Well at this point TheBigFatJ is either ignoring me, or he is a troll. I have given him plenty of logically sound reasoning and he has yet to address any of it, yet he continues with his claims.

I'm pretty sure there is a giant vault full of wii's somewhere, and Reggie jumps off a diving board and goes swimming into them.

This is true. Xbox360 sold ALOT more than it should have, last winter. The only huge release was Gears of War (I think).... The Wii was basically sold out starting November 19th, 2006, and it continues to this day. That changed alot of peoples minds about which console to buy (gotta play something!)

My theory: Nintendo has a lot of high paid people studying how much demand there is. They are releasing about what the demand is. They are stockpiling them because when the big games come out demand goes up. Why have extra ones just sitting on shelves, when another region has demand go up and they can't get them because they are in the US.

Short version: They send different quantities to different places each week so that the maximum amount are sold to consumers; it's less likely that systems will be sitting unsold in one area and undershipped in another.

Basic business of what to do when demand exceeds supply. Thank you.

I think the reason any company piles anything for the holidays is to stunt competition. The reality is, the number of consoles sold would be the same for the Wii regardless of when those consoles are released however this is a distinct market that opens up during the holidays that is otherwise unavailable any other time of the year.

During the holidays, people feel obligated to buy gifts. This is something that is untrue during the rest of the year. At this time, the number of impulse buyers increases dramatically. People who normally wouldnt buy a console for whatever reason from being low income to not having personal interest will all of a sudden consider it as a gift for someone like thier kids. This market is not available the rest of the year so to sell to them you have to put your products on the shelves or they will buy a competitors product instead.

The idea here, is the holiday shopper is not like the normal every day shopper. A product can expand their install base by selling to these people rather than to their normal customers because the normal customer will buy the product anyway at any time. If the Wii doesnt keep the shelves stocked then those impulse buyers will simply buy a different console and those customers will be lost permanently.

Any way thats just my take on it. Not sure if that is true or whether or not its the primary reason to stockpile.

Not having enough supply during the Holiday season was one of the reasons ps3 started to spiral. And ppl started picking up all the nintendo wii's lying around. Until they sold out too. But everyone seems to have forgotten Sony purposefully restricted supply at launch.

The system who sold the most was simply the system that had the most supply. X360 made bank, smart move by microsoft.

Which illustrates just how important it is to have as much supply as high as possible during the holidays.

@ckmlb

Shame on Nintendo for making a console that is irresistable. Shame on them for pricing it so that dozens of millions of people can afford. Shame on them for not thinking to produce 10M consoles a month so that they could meet initial demand by the end of the first full year of their consoles lifetime. Shame on them.

here is what i think short and simple nintendo stockpiles to meed the impulse buy for the holidays. this is teh key to selling lots of systems. the 360 did it last year. so that while the ps3 and wii was sold out the 360 benefited fromt he shortages. this year nitendo doesnt want shortages at all so that the wii can get into the impulse buyers hands.

 So a company of just over 3k employees has a lot of people solely for the job of figuring out how many consoles to ship? 

Its quite likely that they have small teams for each major region to figure out what to ship, but its not hard to sell  out when you could ship everything each month and still out. Time has shown that they give bumps more as a courtesy to big games, rather than as a preventative measure to lower sellouts.