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Nintendo Wii: The Buzz Goes On

Wii still a most-wanted but hard-to-find gift

By Mark Huffman
ConsumerAffairs.com

December 17, 2007    Spanish

A cynic might say you build a buzz, then don’t produce quite enough of the product to meet demand, making consumers want it even more. Whether it actually happened that way, the effect has been the same. Consumers start forming lines in front of stores whenever they hear a new shipment of Wiis is about to arrive.

Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aime says, emphatically, there is nothing contrived about the shortage. He says Nintendo did not anticipate the initial demand for its hot new product and, in the last 12 months, has simply been unable to catch up.

Since the product launched in November 2006, Fils-Aime says the company has sold six million units and increased its production of Wii consoles from one million to 1.8 million a month. But he says consumers are buying them in as fast as the company can produce them. In a conversation with reporters last week, he denied Nintendo has purposefully held back some of that production from retailers.

Nintendo says it will allow consumers to purchase a “raincheck” for a Wii, with guaranteed delivery by the end of January. But consumers can only purchase the raincheck through one retailer, GameStop.

The buzz builds

Meanwhile, not only has the buzz surrounded Wii not subsided, it appears to be growing. November 2007 was the system’s biggest sales month ever, with consumers snapping up 981,000 of the consoles.

Online electronics retailer Bens Bargains has actually launched a Website call Wiitracker.com, providing a constantly updated list of merchants who have Wiis in stock. The Web site’s operator, Ben Chui, told USA Today that “the legend of Wii has grown” over the last year.

And it may not be completely due to the shortage. The revolutionary nature of Wii, with its motion sensitive controller and emphasis on user-movement, has expanded the universe of video gamers to include people who previously showed little interest in video games.

Wii quickly attracted a number of female fans, and families found the Wii games to be a fun source of group activities. The system even won the tacit approval of researchers at the Mayo Clinic, who expressed support for video games that require users to physically move.

"We know if kids play video games that require movement, they burn more energy than they would while sitting and playing traditional screen games. That's pretty obvious even without our data," said Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, Ph.D., Mayo obesity researcher and study leader.

"The point is that children -- very focused on screen games -- can be made healthier if activity is a required part of the game."

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