Is Nintendo purposely starving the market of Wiis to make the demand seem larger?

Though this has been talked about before, I wanted to give my perspective since I actually work in the manufacturing industry. I won’t say who I work for, but I will say that I work for a juice company that is a subsidiary of one of the major soda manufacturers.

Though the company I work for would be considered a smaller company, we have grown on a consistent basis every year, and we will soon be opening what’s called a co-packer on the other side of the country. A co-packer is a company or plant that makes your product but is not owned by you. So essentially, we are increasing our production in the same way that people are asking Nintendo to do with the Wii.

While I don’t know exactly how Nintendo controls the manufacturing side of their business, I seriously doubt that Nintendo actually owns the plants that manufacture its systems and games. I’m sure it’s outsourced.

I’ve gone through the trouble to explain this in order to help you better understand Nintendo and my company’s position. We’ve been working to get this co-packer up and going for several months now. By the time it is operational with our product, it will have been about a year. This is the point I think that a lot of people miss. Again, it will be around a full year once they get going. Why? Because there’s so much that goes into it.

Have they ever run our product before? Have they ever run similar products before? Do they have the equipment to manufacture it, or do they need to buy the equipment and have it built and installed? How are the preliminary runs? Was there a lot of downtime? Where are the negotiations? Is there something that’s putting the negotiations on hold? How many will units will they make? Where will the components needed to make the product be purchased and shipped from?

These are only some of the questions. This is a very long and complicated process. And while I believe that Nintendo probably has more experienced people that are better equipped to handle these problems than my company, it’s still not easy, and I’m sure that it would take them a significant amount of time to get a plant up and running.

But by the time they do all of this, the demand may not be there anymore. Demand and sales forecast is such a crap shoot a lot of the time. Who knows how consumers will respond?

There’s a lot more that I could and want to say, but I’ll stop myself. This article is already longer that I expected it to be. Suffice it to say, the conspiracy theory about Nintendo starving the market for Wiis is doubtfully true. Think about one of their major consumer markets for the Wii: older people who haven’t played games for a long time or maybe ever. Those are spontaneous purchases. They may never have the desire to buy that system again except for that one time they were walking through the store. I believe that every time Nintendo misses their chance to sell a Wii to one of those people, they potentially lose a sale for life.

So stop watching those conspiracy theory movies.