During the next month

Feb 16, 2010 09:16 GMT  ·  By

For much of 2008, one of the main story lines related to the Nintendo Wii, which, back then, was the undisputed king of the current generation of videogame consoles, was that the company could not produce them at a high enough rate to satisfy customer demand. Especially in time for Christmas, Nintendo was forced to make apologetic statements about not being ready for the demand generated by United States and by Japanese gamers.

And it seems that the supply issue narrative is returning at the beginning of this year, with Nintendo claiming that the price drop, which has seen the cost of the Nintendo Wii go from 249 to 199 dollars has made it difficult to supply all the devices that stores need in order to meet demand. January has already seen signs of problems and even as Nintendo is increasing production, February is expected to be even worse.

Charlie Scibetta, who is the corporate communication vice president at Nintendo, told Joystiq that “In the short term, replenishing Wii inventories will be a challenge. But we are doing everything we can to satisfy consumers looking to purchase a Wii system.” This statement comes only a few short months after Nintendo scaled back production of the home console, ordering a smaller than expected amount of components from its suppliers.

It seems that the leaders of Nintendo might have moved too quickly to slash production when the console reached an unhealthy production in the summer of 2009 and they might now again need to move fast and without having all the data in order to make sure that they sell all the gaming consoles they can when demand is high. Some have even speculated that the firm might be restricting the supply of the Wii in order to generate higher demand in the short term and increase the popularity of the device.