09.18.07

Wii Will Be With You Shortly

Posted in Gaming, Rants at 4:47 am

(EDIT: I underestimated BBC America; Torchwood runs almost incessantly between now and Saturday, when the new episode runs. It’s set to TiVo until I catch up (probably tomorrow). Now, back to your regularly scheduled gaming rant…)

Picking up from yesterday, my mom was talking a little bit about when I was going to come back home for a visit, and if I would be willing to leave the Wii with her so she can beat me even worse in Wii Sports Bowling. I am not proud to admit this, but my mom was the first in our house to break 200 on that particular game. This also glosses over the fact that my mother, sweet as she is, also happens to be one of the better players of NES Pinball among my bloodline. Sadly, I won’t be leaving the machine in her hands anytime soon– or at all, actually; I fear for my pride– but it did raise an interesting point.

The Wii was launched in November of 2006, and it is now late September of 2007. People are still having trouble finding the machines, here, even ten months on. As near as I can tell, this is quite unprecedented in the history of gaming. My mother staked out a toy store with my grandmother for the N64. I myself pre-ordered the Game Boy Advance just because I knew it was going to be hot. People were literally killing each other over the PS3. Within months of their respective launches, those machines were in plentiful supply. What happened here?!

I do not buy the stock answer of Nintendo holding back production to inflate demand. Nor do I buy the equally stock answer of casual gaming having shot to such great heights as to strip the stores bare of the coveted objects. I can certainly see the symptoms of both– Nintendo refusing to compromise on the quality of certain components, bottlenecking production; and casual gamers are lapping up certain titles with furious abandon, specifically “Carnival Games”. But neither one could be solely to blame for such a shortage. Combined they should only produce a moderate amount of inconvenience. Again I ask: what happened?

Here’s the other thing. The other consoles have had myriad technical and social issues– the Red Ring of Death prime among them, and Sony’s well-known tricksery with the PS3 ‘price drop’. Aside from some early problems with the strap, the Wii has received very little in the way of complaints. You would think that a machine that is so ubiquitous as to be sold out would have an above-average rate of failure; kind of like how World of Warcraft has an above-average amount of jerks simply because it’s the biggest MMO out right now. Why is the Wii such a quiet little beast?!

When I first bought my Wii, way back in late January, I said that I wanted to grab it before there was a ’second launch’ effect on the release of Smash and Metroid. At the time, there were scoffs that such an effect wouldn’t happen; that production would have ramped up by that point to negate the additional demand. Funny, but it looks like we were both right. There was no ’second launch’ effect because we’re still not out of the first. I’ve really been glad of my decision at times– the fact that it pulls double-duty as a Wii and GC has been a good bonus to it while newer titles finish up development, but that era is coming to an end– but there have been some stretches that the machine hasn’t seen much use. Usually it’s because I’ve been concentrating on another title, on another system, so that’s hardly indicative of any kind of lack of quality in the titles I do enjoy. And anyway, it’s not like I didn’t run into some stinkers in the launch set, anyway– Rayman was too hard and Super Swing Golf controlled like a cow on Dr. House’s Happy Pills (I’m avoiding using the actual name lest I attract even more comment spam than I already get).

And here’s the other million-dollar question: Was Wii Sports really enough to carry the machine this far? I’ll be the first to admit that there has been a lack in number of highly-polished titles on the shelves. Casuals and hardcore alike have been forced to deal with maybe less than a hundred games in the section to this point; while this isn’t all that dissimilar to the Gamecube’s first ten months, the difference is that the GC actually had consoles on the shelves when the big games like Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker hit. What, truly, caused this fantastic jump in perceived sales?

On a darker note, will this cause a backlash? I’m a pretty pessimistic guy myself, so I keep wondering if the perceived scarcity of the Wii might just make some potential buyers so turned off that they’ll settle for anything else– or nothing at all. If that’s the case, why haven’t we seen a commensurate lack of PS3s or 360s in the stores? Gaming has to have hit it big, but I wonder why it’s focused on one machine so exclusively. Why is it just the Wii selling so well?

I seriously don’t get it. Honestly. There are fanboy answers and there are anti-fanboy answers, but none of those are the truth. Why are there no Wiis in stock?

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