Anyone cop a Wii this weekend? What's opinion of raincheck deal?

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mrtonguetwista

mrtonguetwista

$$ Deep Pockets $$
#1
Feb 6, 2003
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I got in line at Target around 6:30am yesterday morning to grab a Wii. The store I was at got 96 consoles in and they did the ticket thing so as long as you had a ticket in hand you were guaranteed a Wii...now I dont know what is a hot game for Wii. I'm debating on either keeping it or selling it since it's so scarce. They're averaging $350 on eBay so I might goto Gamestop Friday and see if I see anyone buying a 360 see if they wanna do an even trade lol


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To help assuage consumers' complaints that they can't find a Wii, Nintendo announced this morning that it will begin a 'Wii Raincheck' program.

Customers who pay in full for a Wii before Christmas can get a raincheck that they will be able to redeem for a Wii in January.

Nintendo also said that many Wii systems will be available in big-box retailers on Sunday.

Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime said in a conference call this morning that the ranincheck program will be run entirely through retailer GameStop, who he says has "many tens of thousands" of certificates.

The certificates will only be available on December 20th and 21st, and consumers must pay the entire $250 up front. The Wii console will be available "sometime in January" and must be picked up before the 29th.


The program, says Fils-Aime, is for people who want "something to put under the tree."

"A certificate needs to be matched to a specific Wii which needs to be matched to a specific store. Only this retailer has the ability to pull off such a program," said Fils-Aime in regards to why GameStop will be the exclusive partner for this initiative.

Fils-Aime also said this morning that Wii will be available this Sunday in many stores, advertised in circulars for Best Buy, Kmart, Sears, Target, Toys R Us, and Circuit City.

Wal-Mart, says Fils-Aime, will be "pushing out massive amounts of Wii systems into their stores all week long."

Fils-Aime also attempted to get customers away from eBay this holiday. "I know there are temptations for consumers to pay more than they really want to to resellers in order to get their hands on a system. We want to say that if you could possibly hold out just a little bit longer, there will be more and more product available in January.


"We are not slowing down" production, he said.
 
G RAIDER

G RAIDER

Sicc OG
#2
Dec 19, 2005
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#2
i was over at target and they said they only had 93... when i got there it was already 8:00 and people had been there since 3:30 in the morning... so all the tickets they handed out where gone by the time i arrived... but i didnt know you had to have a ticket until waiting 45 minutes in line to get turned down... so the lady upfront told me that i could wait until 10a.m. to see if someone forgot to pick theirs up... so i waited there for another hour and luckly the last one did not get picked up and i got it... but damn there not hard to get you just gotta be willing to go to the store at 3:00a.m. or sumthin and wait a few hours
 
mrtonguetwista

mrtonguetwista

$$ Deep Pockets $$
#4
Feb 6, 2003
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lol..not hard to get?

They're impossible to find. Only reason people were out Sunday morning cause all the reports that the big box stores were recieving shipments.
 
mrtonguetwista

mrtonguetwista

$$ Deep Pockets $$
#5
Feb 6, 2003
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Nintendo will miss out on an estimated $1.3 billion (£639 million) in sales this Christmas by failing to meet soaring global demand for its Wii video games console.

James Lin, an analyst at MDB Capital, which monitors retail activity, said Nintendo could sell twice the 1.8 million Wii consoles that it is manufacturing each month. “There are as many people who want a Wii but end up walking away empty-handed as there are who get one,” he said.

Production has been hit by shortages of components, Nintendo says, and it insists it is doing all it can to meet demand. Some analysts believe, however, that the company privately welcomes tight supplies because it wants to delay market saturation to prolong interest in the console.

Consumers also have their suspicions. A proliferation of online conspiracy theories recently forced Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo’s American operation, to reject accusations of a “secret plan to store Wiis in a warehouse to spur demand”.

Mr Lin said: “It’s a difficult balance, but at this stage, shortages are not the worst thing”. The Wii is 12 months into its expected lifespan of between four and six years.

Nintendo has raised production targets several times in recent months and now plans to ship 17.5 million units globally this year, up from 14 million. It said that demand “has been higher than we could ever have anticipated”.

This month the company said that it was withdrawing planned television advertising for the Wii because of severe shortages of the games console in the run-up to Christmas.

Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst for Screen Digest, the market research firm, said: “There has probably been a certain amount of supply chain mismanagement. But Nintendo could not have predicted the level of demand.”

He added that the shortages were also “a function of Nintendo’s ‘just-in-time’ supply chain, which keeps inventories down to a minimum and is proving hugely profitable”.

Built to appeal to “non-core gamers” — women and older people hitherto ignored by the games industry — the Wii has outsold both Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 by more than two to one this year.

Stock market investors appear to believe that Nintendo can maintain its success. Over the past two years the group’s shares have risen fivefold to make the company Japan’s third most valuable quoted business.

However, last month Sony’s PlayStation 3 beat the monthly sales of the Wii in Japan for the first time, signalling that the battle between the two next-generation consoles may yet have further to run.

Sony sold 183,217 PS3s in Japan in the four weeks to November 25, against sales of 159,193 for the Wii, according to the closely watched survey from Enterbrain, the games magazine publisher. Analysts have argued that the Wii – a product largely constructed from off-the-shelf components – runs the risk of suffering a much shorter lifespan that the PS3, which is largely powered by expensively developed proprietary technology.
 
H

hella_numb

Sicc OG
#6
Aug 7, 2003
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#6
i dont know bout a wii as your only next gen console. I mean it would be coo to play with for a couple of hours or if you got a lot of people to play it with but other then that ill take a ps2 over a wii.
 
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