Nintendo Wii Auction Madness Ends
I'm not sure if you remember a few years ago, when the Nintendo Wii was a huge deal that was absolutely taking over the world. It seemed to take a few years, but it seems like the Nintendo Wii has finally lost its amazing momentum. In a few short years that it's been now it has already sold tens of millions of systems. By most measures, it is the most successful video game system ever.
When the Nintendo Wii was at its peak, the online auction site eBay was an absolute mess. Even though the systems could be bought for as little as two hundred and fifty dollars in stores, the supply of them was so low that people were able to command premium prices on online sites like eBay. Even though Nintendo worked amazingly hard to fill the demand in stores and they just couldn't keep up. And so a whole market of second or third party sales sprang up.
It took at least two maybe three years for the Nintendo Wii to really finally calm down. And for people to get some sense about them. Perhaps it was in part due to the massive recession. That put the hurt on most people's wallets. Then again, at the same time, the competitors Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were able to cut price while Nintendo maintained their same pricing structure.
For most companies you could see what Nintendo did as an overwhelming success, but if you're one of the people who really wanted to find a Wii to buy one for their kids what they did was terrible. Instead of adjusting their game forecasts or the overall supply chain they just let the online auction scene absorb the extra value that they were unable to capture themselves. This led to hoarding and other kinds of unpleasant behavior in the marketplace.
You would expect the company that created such iconic family-friendly characters as Mario and Zelda to have a little bit more common sense about how they were going about their business. But that doesn't really take into account the fact that it they had really had a pretty major flop on their hands with the Nintendo GameCube. By all accounts, the Sony PlayStation 3, and even the Microsoft Xbox were both much more successful than Nintendo's previous console. I think that Nintendo is probably just afraid to go out and hit a home run. Even though the Nintendo DS was such a huge hit. They were not sure that the Nintendo Wii was going to do as well.
Luckily, all those problems are behind us and the Nintendo Wii auction shortages have pretty much ended in the same way that the music game genre has fallen off the cliff. This is good because both of those trends were not exactly positive for the overall game industry or even people buying games. Now, if you're one of those people that was able to buy a two hundred fifty dollar Wii and resell it for five hundred dollars well, good for you, but for the rest of us were all glad that that's not really normal now. It's a shame that it went on for as long as it did.
I am curious to see what the next big trend in eBay land might be. Of course, every year, there is always some kind of hot toy or item like tickle me Elmo comes along, but the Nintendo Wii was really interesting because it seemed to have a lot more staying power. It wasn't really a fad so much as it was a serious economic imbalance that created the Nintendo Wii shortages.
My guess is that the next big thing will be the Apple iPad. Sure, they aren't that hard to find in stores, but Apple is artificially limiting the amount that each person can buy. So I wouldn't be surprised to find that some people are going to extreme lengths just to purchase one. Also, once the 3G version hits stores. There is going to be even more demand.
Food for thought.