IMO Nintendo is stockpiling and transfering unit to America; moreover, it's natural for demand to drop a bit after holiday period; DS hardware sales drop is a testament to that.

Sqrl said: @Just_Ben, Actually from what I have read its available in certain places but far from all places in the PAL regions. But that is also based on stories and the like so its not very useful from a perspective of statistic and analysis.

Well the big in Europe seem to have it. We have enough German and British some Swedish and Belgian here all saying it is in stock, so thats for sure. And if you take Amazon as indicator, it is also availible in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal. I think we have enough Australians to tell us the status there. kber could give us a status for Poland. I didn't hear that it is out of stock in an european country for quite some time know.

 

whatever, a SUDDEN 50% sales drop is quite surprising for any consoles .
Usually, there sales will slowly decrease ...
There are maybe something that we dont know about these numbers.
Next weeks may help to understand.

Just_Ben said: kber could give us a status for Poland. I didn't hear that it is out of stock in an european country for quite some time know.

Wii is very expensive in Poland - ~$365 (it's berely cheaper than X360) it wasn't supply constraint even for a moment here. It's partly because of lack of Nintendo support for this market...

Just_Ben said: rasone77 said: Long and short; Where demand increases, is where supply gets diverted. Where demand decreases is where it comes from. No, No, No. Shipping here and there more or less units just don work on a week by week basis. AND the demand in Europe is met. Thats just something a lot of people here on the board seem to forget. Europe has no supply problems on the Wii. You can get it everywhere, anytime. My guess is, that this so in all PAL countrys. And i don't think that the Units in America are Japanese. I don't think you can change the production week by week. Those are units from the increased production. The drop off means most likely that the Wii will be starting to be availably in Japan, sharky is mentioning that it is not sold out anymore, and I believe that, at least for some regions or shops. 2 or 3 similar slow weeks and the Wii could finally be broadband available in Japan. That would leaves only America with supply problems and is it likely that the production increase goes right way to America. Seems that I was not so far of, with predicting the Wii sells 120 k at end of august/begin of September. And i expect much bigger shipment from week to week know for USA. So either the sales goes through the roof or the Wii is also beginning to be available in US at least till Christmas.

Unless it's planned in advance. Differences between the 2 NTSC consoles are propably pretty much nothing, in fact, even the PAL version doesn't really differentiate from NTSC versions. I think Nintendo has expected this time of the year being quiet in Japan and shipped more units to US. This explains the MP3 release date, it was released when there were a possibility to ship more units to US. But i do hope that production have increased and the US increase is because of that. And yes, you can find Wii when you want one, but necessarily the store, from where you would want to buy one, may be sold out from Wiis. But, you can still find it.

Well, here's another explanation: There's been no new Wii game in 4 or 5 weeks! And PS3 had Bladestorm this week.

I'm not saying this isn't a problem Nintendo has to address. Anybody knows what releases are next in Japan over the next weeks?

A real measure would be "how long a shipment stays on the shelves before it sells out". This is a nice analog measure, so you could graph it and get a good feeling for it.

As a few people have mentioned, there are a few factors in play here. Either way re: the thread title "Nintendo base crumbling" - no, 100% definitely not...

1/ Holiday period over
2/ No/minimal new Wii games
3/ Smaller shipments
4/ Kids back to school

Another factor is this: In Australia (at least), there have been various Wii bundles released - effectively a price drop. I haven't heard of any bundle offers in Japan, or any form of price drop.

Any if you are going to have a drop in sales - this is the perfect time of year for it. Within a couple of weeks the pre-Xmas title flood will start... and I'll be shocked if ever Wii in Japan isn't sold by the end of the year. WiiFit alone could trigger that - especially in Japan.

I'm sorry but before that Japan didn't have strong releases either and still the WII was selling at a range of 60-70.000 per week. The drop is kind of a worry, especially as there "won't" be any interesting titles for the Japanese to release until October.

kber81 said: Just_Ben said: kber could give us a status for Poland. I didn't hear that it is out of stock in an european country for quite some time know. Wii is very expensive in Poland - ~$365 (it's berely cheaper than X360) it wasn't supply constraint even for a moment here. It's partly because of lack of Nintendo support for this market...

 It wasn't supply constraint in Poland, sure. If you take out the first two months since it's debut in Europe.Believe it or not i have been asking people at Ultima and Empik about their supply and was really surprised back then. It seems that they had more preorders than they could actually handle. Especially Ultima. The last i spoke with them on the subject they told me that the last preorder they took care of was realised in early Februaury. And yeah, the wii is expensive in Poland. Hell all of the electronic gizmos here are annoyingly expensive. 

 

I don't see how a huge drop in sales across the market has become a concern only for the Wii... Their drop was slightly larger, but if we go by VGC numbers (Famitsu numbers) then the Wii didn't drop anymore this week, and we are looking at standard market sales fluctuation. Seriously people look at some sales history on this site sometime. The PS2 had weeks as low as 3K at this time of the year, and their average sales are not even close to the Wii's.

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=Japan&cons2=PS2&reg2=Japan&cons3=X360&reg3=All&align=1&weekly=1

Not to mention the Wii hasn't had a single big game released in Japan since Mario Party 8.  In 6 weeks Super Mario Galaxy will be out and I'm sure sales will rocket (temporarily) then settle back at the insanely high norm.