Nintendo Projects Wii Shortages Going Forward

“If You See Wii, Buy It,” Says Nintendo

by Anton Shilov
07/11/2007 | 01:48 PM

Executives from Nintendo believe that success of the company’s latest Wii game console will not slowdown in the foreseeable future and that during pre-Christmas sales the gaming machine will still be hard to get. The reasons were not given, but it seems that even the company itself is surprised with such performance of its latest product.

“There is no guarantee that we are not going to have ‘out-of-stocks’ this holiday season. If you see one, buy it. Don't assume that you can come back later and find one,” George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications for Nintendo of America, said in an interview with Reuters news-agency.

Nintendo Wii has been dominating the game console market of the USA since January, 2007, because of low-price and motion-sensitive controller. Due to the fact that demand towards Wii was steadily high, many retailers sold out their stock. However, the console was aimed at casual gamers from the beginning and it was not obvious whether the initial success of Wii will persist, or sales of the console drops as soon as the market gets fed up with simplistic games Nintendo offers. Therefore, the claim of a Nintendo official that the shortages will continue means that the company expects further acceleration of sales, but it does not know how exactly the demand will grow.

“We’re trying to figure out what’s the reasonable monthly level, and as we’ve seen every time we ship product to the market, whether it’s in Japan or here in the U.S. or in Europe, it sells out in a matter of days,” Mr. Harrison reportedly said.

Nintendo Wii console features IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture-based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that operates at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii uses 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.

Nintendo set the recommended retail price of ¥25 000 (about $204) in Japan, $249 in the U.S. and €249 ($342) in Europe.