Nintendo Retracts One Million Wiis Promise, Outsells PS3 Anyway

In a press release this morning, Nintendo issued a correction to a statement made the day before, asking readers to disregard just one sentence. That sentence, however, may have been the critical one: a promise that one million Wii game consoles would be available in the US before the end of this year.

Therefore, disregard the following sentence: "Despite spot shortages in some locations, well more than a million Wii systems will be available in the United States by the end of the year." The other part of the disregarded sentence you should regard is the characterization of possible shortages as "spot."

Last July, suppliers of equipment for Nintendo told Taiwanese industry publications that they had been told to prepare to ship enough equipment to make one million Wii consoles available at launch. At the same time, the company was promising to make two million consoles available worldwide by the end of the year.

Based on the latest data released this afternoon by industry analysis firm NPD Group, an estimate of one million units produced might not have been inconceivable. Just since its launch three weeks ago, the Wii sold 476,000 units in the US alone. Worldwide data has yet to be tabulated, though when the final numbers are in, the company may very well have built more than one million units before the end of 2006. But whether one million units remain available after the holiday sales rush, may have been a tall order.

Something else Nintendo might have to think about retracting is its own sales estimates. The company previously boasted of selling close to 500,000 Wii consoles in the US during its first seven days. While NPD's tally remains impressive, the Wii did not outsell the Xbox 360.

For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 launches, timed one week apart, they may have unwittingly ended up feeding Microsoft's plans. According to NPD's numbers, Xbox 360 sold 511,000 units in November, during a month that NPD vice president for industry analysis Stephen Baker described earlier this week as a strong month for consumer electronics in volume, dampened by lackluster revenues on account of steeper discounts.

"Consumers knew what they were looking for," Baker said in a prepared statement. "They came, they saw, they conquered, and they went home with basically what was on their lists and not much else."

One possible exception: PlayStation 3, which may have been on a multitude of lists of shoppers who went home with an Xbox 360. Only 197,000 PS3s were sold last month, according to NPD, suggesting that if retail sellouts are truly due to lack of availability, Sony shipped about half the number of units for North America that it had promised.

Microsoft did not expend much more revenue for games promotion than in a normal month, but walked away from November with almost 42% of console sales. Given an average software attach rate of 5 (up from 3 the previous year), Microsoft could potentially have generated close to $128 million in sales of games alone in the US during November.

Yesterday, Nintendo boasted a software attach rate of 2 for the Wii. This number, from a retailer's perspective, is not good; typically, the brass ring is set at 4.

If Wii's sales can truly be characterized as lower than anticipated, but good nonetheless, then any shortages seen between now and New Year's Day could very well be "spots." Surely, the folks at Nintendo have ways to work out their frustrations, hopefully without throwing their new remotes around.

In other remote news today, the gaming news site Kotaku reports that Interlink Electronics is taking Nintendo to court in Delaware for alleged patent infringement regarding its Wii wireless remote control device.

Court papers filed in US District Court neglected to specify what part of Interlink's patented device Nintendo's allegedly infringes upon, though drawings submitted with the petition show a extended barrel-like device twisted by a thumb over a hinge, which operates a switch inside a casing. A position-sensitive switch that detects movement by the user's hand, is also described.