Yeah, me and my hip-hop CDs.  If you know me, you know I just can’t get enough hip-hop music…uh huh…yeah….that’s for sure…

I had to laugh at Air1 this morning as I was driving into work.  I LOVE Air1, don’t get me wrong.  Best Christian radio we here in the spuds have access to.  But this morning they had their news lady read a certain news story with a tone of voice that was like “Uh oh, Nintendo REALLY messed up this time.”  Like a mother who sees an unkempt room 30 minutes after telling the occupant to clean it.  Of course, the big Nintendo news lately is this.  Nintendo is allowing customers to have their wrist-straps replaced on their Wii Remotes if they are concerned about them breaking and sending the remote flying into a TV, wall, small child, or unstable explosive substance lying around the house.  3.2 Million straps, the story says.  And the Air1 news chick says it will cost Nintendo “several million dollars.”  Oh wow, that really will set them back, huh.  Shame on Nintendo. 

I mean from what I’ve seen online at least 3% of Wii customers have had this issue of unintentionally puncturing TVs with their Wiimotes.  Big problem.  I mean teenagers should be able to flail around at warp speed and not have their TV broken.  I can’t think of anything else in the house that if you picked up, swung as violently as possible around in your hand and then let go, would break things in the house.  That’s so unreasonable.  And it must be legit, after all teenagers are very responsible with other things, such as cell phones and cars.  Yes, no news story points out that teenagers are the ones breaking things with the Wii, but I know it’s the case.  I just know it.  I sat outside Target overnight waiting to get a Wii with a crowd of these people.  10 minutes after the store closed for the night they were having shopping cart races in the parking lot.  And that’s just how the evening started.

I’ve had a Wii since launch day and I can assure you, I’ve never come close to breaking a Wii controller.  I assume because I have a generally reasonable grasp on common applications of physics and usually try to take good care of things I spend hundreds of dollars on.  But personal prejudices aside, let’s look at how negative this story really IS for Nintendo.  According to this, Nintendo sold 476,000 Wiis in the US in November.  Plus 918,000 DS’s and 641,000 Gameboy Advances.  So at $250 for the Wii, $130 for the DS, and the Advance for $80, that’s $119 Million for the Wii, $119,340,000 for the DS, and $51,280,000 for the Gameboy Advance.  $289,620,000 in US sales in the month of November.  Word is that 600,000 Wiis have sold by now in the US (including the previous number for November) and 400,000 in Japan.  Add to that the numbers from the UK:  100,000 units sold since launch in the beginning of December.  And Australia’s 32,000 units on their launch day.  So, just to make the math simpler and because I don’t have the time to look up prices and exchange rates, let’s just say that every Wii sold across the globe = $250 bucks.  Including the DS and Advance numbers stated earlier, this brings Nintendo’s November and December numbers to at least $453 million.  Now I know that 50 million bucks is a heck of a lot of money, but that number looks darn close to half a billion dollars. 

Ms. Air1 News Lady, I think Nintendo is doing juuust fine.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.