Nintendo announced this week that it sold roughly six hundred thousand Wii consoles in the United States in the first eight days after launch, which by itself is a genuinely startling number, and the part that is actually revealing is what happened the month before. In October, before launch, Nintendo shipped only around five hundred thousand units total across the entire month. The company appears to have badly underestimated its own console, and three weeks into retail, that miscalculation is the story.
I have been able to find exactly one Wii in a shop since launch day, and it was not for me, it was a friend who queued before opening on a weekday morning and still nearly missed out. That is not proof of anything on its own, anecdotes rarely are, but it lines up with what every retailer I have spoken to is saying, which is that shipments sell out within hours and there is no visibility into when the next batch arrives.
The interesting comparison is what this shortage is not. Sony’s PlayStation 3 launched two weeks earlier at more than double the price and has generated genuine anger, resale scalping, and stories about people getting mugged for their console in the queue. Nintendo’s shortage is generating the opposite reaction, mostly bemused patience, because the console costs two hundred and fifty dollars rather than six hundred and the box actually includes a game people want to play rather than a promise about hardware nobody outside enthusiast circles cares much about.
That game is Wii Sports, bundled in rather than sold separately, and I do not think its importance to this launch is fully appreciated yet. It is not a good game by any conventional measure, the graphics are minimal and the depth is shallow, and none of that matters because it is the first thing that has made a games console genuinely legible to somebody who has never held a controller. I watched a fairly determined non-gamer figure out Wii tennis inside about ninety seconds this week, which is not something I have ever watched happen with any other console launch title.
Whether Nintendo can actually fix the supply problem before the shortage becomes the whole story of this launch is the open question. Production is reportedly running at something like one point eight million units a month worldwide, and if that estimate holds, catching up with a demand curve nobody predicted correctly is going to take considerably longer than anyone at Nintendo would like to admit in public right now. My honest guess, and it is only a guess, is that this remains difficult to buy through the holidays and well into next year, which is an unusual problem to have and a considerably better one than the alternative.