In my opinion it’s mostly a logistical failure, which is a direct result of the corporate headquarters’ focus on the domestic Japanese market to the exclusion of other markets. Even though the Wii is selling at a rate 2 to 3 times that of Japan’s sales, Nintendo has explicitly said that they have no intention of shifting their focus to North America. Translation: they don’t give a flying fuck about the US market.
The console is region locked, with no support for multiple languages. Hardware accessories are also region locked, as my friend in Tokyo found out when someone from the US who came to visit him was unable to use her US controller with his Japanese-purchased Wii. Coupled with Sony and other manufacturers recently coming down heavily on importers, this has made the import market, which would normally have worked to equalize the logistics a bit, virtually unviable.
They have ramped up production to much higher levels than they originally planned for, but they obviously don’t want to be stuck with unsold stock, so they’re maintaining at a level that mostly covers their core market (Japan) and sort-of-but-not-really satisfies demand in other markets. They are reasonably available here, though you might have to check at a different store if the first place doesn’t happen to have one in stock. It almost goes without saying that every other place in Akihabara has a few on hand.
I like a lot of things about the Wii, but there are some real head-scratchers. The online component is so cumbersome that it looks like a primitive leftover from the 90s. It should be at least as easy to use (if not as flashy) as Xbox Live. When Microsoft makes something that is more user-friendly than your system, you should know you’ve fucked up somewhere. Casual gamers seem to love community and collaborative stuff, so making it really, really difficult to get together with your friends online to play games together is effectively gutting the social aspects that would probably be embraced by the the core Wii market.
Likewise, they haven’t tapped into the substantial nostalgia market with older games. A lot of those original Nintendo games were simple and fun, which is the same market they’re targeting now, and there are some “hardcore” gamers who would buy it just so they’d have something better than a hacked console loaded with grey-market ROMs to play all that old stuff on. While a bunch of those have been released here, not many have made their way to the US.
Even worse, the way they have implemented the content is very shoddy. Unlike Live releases of old games, there’s been no updating of graphics, new content, or even a good way to store the games. You have to swap games between memory cards and internal storage to play them, and the internal storage is very limited. Similarly, some of the content is not downloadable at all, and is streamed instead, which doesn’t actually work very well sometimes.
I think Sage Rat’s analysis is mostly right, that they didn’t really have a clear idea what they were going for. My impression is that they had a couple of great ideas (casual games, pointing controller) and concentrated on that, but then threw in a bunch of other stuff at the last minute. Some of the problem areas are clearly poorly-implemented afterthoughts.
Nintendo’s network failings are no real surprise though. No Japanese-based company has done online gaming well at all. They really and truly Do. Not. Get. It. Broadband penetration here is higher than the US even, but there are virtually no gamers who do online play. Even computer gaming is offline only. World of Warcraft, for example, while huge in the rest of the world, including China and Korea, never even got translated for Japan because no one was interested and no one would get online to play it. Yeah, just about the world’s biggest online gaming phenomenon and it was entirely ignored here.
It’s been known