The Wii went on sale on 19 November at $249.99 and it is already impossible to buy, which tells you something, though not yet the thing everyone wants it to tell you.
Sold out at launch is the weakest signal in this industry. Every console sells out at launch, because every manufacturer ships a constrained number of units into a market of people who preordered months ago. Sony is sold out too. The question that matters is what happens in February, when the enthusiasts have theirs and the machine has to convince somebody who was not already convinced.
What I think Nintendo has actually got right is the price. Two hundred and fifty dollars is not a console price this generation, it is a toy price, and it sits in a completely different mental category from the number Sony is asking. A parent buying a Wii is making a decision roughly the size of buying a bicycle. A parent buying a PlayStation 3 is making a decision they need to discuss with somebody first. Nintendo has spent this entire generation refusing to fight on specifications, and the payoff is that it gets to fight on impulse instead.
Bundling Wii Sports was the other correct call, and I suspect it was the more important one. It is not a good game in any sense a reviewer would recognise. Five thin sports, no depth, graphics that would have looked ordinary two hardware generations ago. It is also the single most effective demonstration any console has ever shipped, because you can hand the remote to somebody who has never played a video game and they will understand tennis in four seconds without being told anything. Nintendo could have sold that separately for fifty dollars. Putting it in the box means every Wii in the world is a demo unit sitting in somebody’s living room.
The launch lineup beyond that is thinner than the enthusiasm suggests. Twilight Princess is excellent and it is also a GameCube game with waggle attached, which is a slightly awkward thing for a flagship to be. Red Steel wants very badly to prove that the remote works for shooters and mostly proves that it does not yet. Rayman is charming. Excite Truck is fine. If you strip out the novelty of the controller, this is not a launch library that would win an argument on its merits.
Then there is the hardware, and I am going to be blunt about it. The Wii is not a next-generation console in any technical sense. It runs at 480p. It has no HD output at all, in a year when both competitors are selling themselves almost entirely on high definition and televisions are finally getting cheap enough that people are buying them. Nintendo has looked at the most visible consumer trend in home entertainment and decided to sit it out completely.
That is either the smartest decision of the generation or the one that ages worst, and I genuinely cannot tell which yet. The case for it is that HD is expensive, most households still have a CRT, and the money saved went into a controller that does something no competitor offers. The case against is that televisions get replaced, and a machine that looks bad on the television somebody buys in 2008 has a problem it cannot patch.
Virtual Console is the part almost nobody is discussing and probably should be. Nintendo has three decades of back catalogue and has just built a shop that sells it directly, a few pounds at a time, to people who already have the emotional attachment. That is close to free revenue on assets that finished paying for themselves twenty years ago. Sony and Microsoft can copy the mechanism. They cannot copy the library.
My honest read is that Nintendo has built something aimed at people who do not currently buy consoles, and the entire bet rests on whether those people buy a second game. Wii Sports gets the machine into the house. Nothing about the launch lineup tells me what the family plays in March. If Nintendo has an answer to that, this generation goes very strangely. If it does not, this is the best-selling paperweight of 2007.