Wii sells out in Canada ... or does it

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Long the also-ran platform in the video-game wars, Nintendo's new Wii console is creating a whole new category of headache for the company: this time out they are too popular.

Nintendo Canada doesn't want to tell us how many Wii units are in the Canadian marketplace, and they can only tell us how many we can expect in the future in the most general terms, but they can say that they didn't anticipate the demand during Sunday's launch that saw a 100% sell out at the country's biggest retailers.

"We're struggling to try and find a solution to a situation in which demand has far outstripped supply," says Nintendo Canada marketing director Pierre-Paul Trepanier. "The expectation was that within a few days (after launch) Nintendo would still be stock everywhere."

What Nintendo can say is that beginning this Thursday and Friday (in most regions, but perhaps not the Maritimes and Eastern Quebec) the next shipment of Wii's should begin hitting stores. Its project the retailers will get up to 50% of the launch-day shipment, which if launch-day patterns repeat, could see most major retail locations with 25-40 in stores.

What happens next week, and the week after is in more doubt: Trepanier says that every region in North America has been clamouring for more equipment, and in the Atlanta region company officials were hit with an urgent plea for more nunchuk controllers. Trepanier claims the Canadian market is doing well keeping its accessories in stock.

But Trepanier says that while there have been no production issues in churning out enough Wii consoles for the target of 4 million units produced and sold globally by the end of 2006 (with perhaps a little more than one million of that available in the American market) the consumer interest seems to have reached far wider and deeper beyond hard-core gamers than Nintendo could have dreamed.

"We wanted that to happen eventually, but we haven't even kicked in our TV advertising yet," says Trepanier. "We purposely held back on TV advertising so that we wouldn't be advertising a product that you couldn't find in stores. We didn't expect groups like families and people who haven't played video games in a while to be suddenly be interested. The demand has been overwhelmingly positive, and it's been hard to deal with."

But with the crunch on to find your console some strange stories have begun circulating on the Internet and in conversation with retail workers at major electronics chains. One story involved a store putting more units on the floor Monday after selling out Sunday, then pulling those units from the shelves for some bewildering reason. Conspiracy theorists have suggested that Nintendo and retailers are creating an artificial shortage.

"I wasn't aware that there were any stocks being held back in retail," Trepanier says. "It's surprising though, I would expect them to want them to make sure all their consumers are happy ... I can assure you that at our warehouse in Vancouver, we have zero units."

Now the company has imposed austerity measures to make sure consumers get first crack at the systems.

Nintendo Canada has had to let its workers and marketing partners know that there will be no employee-plan or promotional units available to them until at least 2007, one memo suggested they go line up at the store like everyone else if they really needed it for Christmas.

As well, both Nintendo and third-party software for the new console has been doing well, with some Canadian retailers reporting that for every Wii sold a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess went with it. Ubisoft's innovative first-person shooter Red Steel came in second place, and Call of Duty 3, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 round out the top five.

And Trepanier says there has been some strong evidence that, unlike the PlayStation 3 experience, most of the Wii's bought go from the store to being played in living rooms, instead of flipped on eBay. Though no official numbers have been collected yet, Nintendo's Virtual Console (where players can download classic Nintendo and Sega games) has experienced far higher than expected traffic.

But as Trepanier says, this game is a marathon, not a sprint, and while encouraging so far, the first week isn't even over yet. The real test will be The NPD Group market data for December, which will be released in the second week of January 2007. Then Trepanier will know just how far down the track this opening week burst has taken Nintendo.