You can’t get a Nintendo Wii for love nor money. Not true actually, you can pay an extortionate amount to a dubious sounding eBayer, but anyway…
Demand for the console has outstripped the 14million units shipped to the UK in April and despite an extra 3.5million hitting our shores, it seems many more children (and let’s face it, adults) will go without the No.1 item on their wishlist this Christmas regardless of how well behaved they’ve been.
Santa will no doubt deliver some other piece of ‘must have’ gadgetry by way of apology, but the phenomenal success of Wii serves some key business lessons.
Launched in direct competition with the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, despite its ground-breaking motion technology (for the initiated who haven’t yet injured themselves in their own lounges playing tennis with invisible rackets or nudged the dog out the way because he’s unknowingly just walked onto the 18th hole at Augusta, it uses a laser to respond to actual body movements), the Wii was initially sneered at by hardened gamers for its inferior graphics, poor selection of games and dismissed as a gimmick.
But sales of the Wii have far eclipsed that of the PS3 and 360. In October Nintendo reported profits for the year had doubled to 132.4bn yen ($1.16bn; £506m) from 54.4bn.
What Nintendo realised was that pre-consoles, traditional games were a communal pursuit. The Wii is at its best with 2-4 players and it also appeals massively to non-gamers put off by the technicalities of cutting edge consoling and the need for finger-tapping wizardry beyond most of us over 12.
Let’s not make this a gaming issue, though. I'm generalising of course and frankly I don’t know enough to defend myself against the obsessives with have no desire whatsoever to upset them.
The point is, Nintendo realised they’d got stuck in a perpetual fight for better graphics, more speed, the next big game – and returned to golden maxim, ‘there’s more than one to fry an egg’.
It found a brilliantly appealing way to adapt the concept of gameplay – and just as cleverly, got its pricing spot on.
Knowing reviewers would drawl over the 360 and PS3’s capabilities and tut-tut disapprovingly at the Wii’s graphical limitations, Nintendo, confident in the knowledge that once people tried the Wii they’d realise its strengths, priced it a good 40% cheaper.
£180 is roughly the same price as an entry iPod putting it in the same bracket as the UK’s favourite mass entertainment commodity and positioned more favourably to the nation’s reluctant but under-pressure parents.
Perversely Sony are actually now benefiting from the Wii’s lack of availability as desperate parents frantically seek a substitute in a bid to prevent the UK’s first nationwide Christmas morning tantrum and Santa’s future brought into serious question.
A price cut in the US saw PS3 sales double to 100,000 a week and the same impact is expected to be announced here.
The final lesson? If you spend all that time making, pricing and marketing the perfect product, make sure you can keep up with demand!