Controller production woes to cause delay, Wii hype just hot air?

Now, we´re so used to reading good news about Wii, this post may come as a bit of a shock to some people. First of all, Omar Ismail, one of the founders of a product review site called ProductWiki, has published an article entitled Why the Wii won´t sell. While he makes many points that are highly opinionated and often objectionable, he has come across an interesting quote by analysts at UBS Warburg, which he published a scan of:

Strong E3 showing? Great third party support? Mr. Ismail´s argument is that it sounds just all too familiar:

The point: E3, analyst comments, and even publisher reactions this early in the console's life don't mean much. Even if there's a lot of enthusiasm for the machine at the beginning, if real-world numbers don't pan out, things can change very rapidly. We saw it happen with the N64 and the Gamecube.

Now, it´s an interesting quote Mr. Ismail dug up, because it really does mirror the current state of affairs.

But while all the lip service by the media and third parties might not go a long way to securing tangible sales figures, the production turnover will. But that, too, could be up in the air.

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Chinese gaming magazine PCGames author Fanhuaqing has apparently been able to visit a factory producing both PSP and Wii consoles. And he learned that there seem to be some severe problems with the production of the Wii controllers. This, apparently, is also responsible for the lack of a definite launch date.

GoNintendo has the translation (not by a native English speaker, so please overlook the spelling mistakes):

Nintendo may not have a confirmed official launch day, due to all sorts of problems related to the controller that prevented mass production.

The factory has received Wii controller’s purchasing order and its sample, but is still stucked in testing phrase. From feedbacks of testers, currently the Wiimote and nunchuck still have a lot of small issues, such as buttons aren’t sensitive, hard to press 2 buttons together, and even no response occasionally, and the current sample is easy to get damaged, using the controller in normal situation will produce some noise, etc. Entering Sept, if the above hardware problems cannot be fixed, it will directly affect Wii’s selling strategy.

Also, the factory has not received the Wii console from Nintendo yet, currently they are testing samples using a dedicated machine only for testing, which means after an up-to-standard sample is produced, it still needs to be sented back to Japan to be tested by Nintendo for the 2nd time.

Well, we should have expected that at least some bad news concerning Wii was imminent. This community has really been blessed with nothing but good news so far. So, from a purely statistical point of view, getting some bad news shouldn´t surprise us. Also, all the positive comments in the past should allow us to put this into perspective.

But while I can easily shrug off the UBS Gamecube quote, the apparent production problems are much harder to stomach. If that turned out to be true, Wii might be delayed, Nintendo might have to downgrade their expected shipments significantly or a whole number of consoles might turn out faulty and would have to be replaced - or even a combination of the above. I am taking this report very seriously and am trying to get in touch with the author to get some direct verification on the story.

Source: ProductWiki, GoNintendo, PCGames
Thanks to: Codename Revolution