Topic: A question on a recent article at Fortune.com

[nolimit19]

an interesting article, but they dont give nintendo teh credit they deserve....totally blowing microsofts position in teh industry out of preportion. but this caught my eye.

"A number of software companies, mistakenly thinking that the global economic downturn would not affect the moonshot growth in game sales, overstocked the retail channel in 2002 and prompted an inventory glut. The same fate befell Nintendo, which recently suspended production of its GameCube console until an unspecified inventory backlog is absorbed."

maybe this is old news to the nerds here, but i havent heard this....thats quite disheartening if it is indeed true. maybe i am being too skepticle, but the way this article tries to avoid mentioning the gamecube makes me wonder. i have only been hearing good things recently with its recent stint at #1 in japan. and i heard that sales had picked up in hte us with the release of fzero and soul calibur. does anyone know the latest number of the gamecube sales compared to ps2 or xbox worldwide? which brings me to another topic...how are people not buying gamecubes! i dont even want to get on that though...just checking for the validity of this article. thanks.

here is another really good article on nintendo.
http://www.business2.com/subscribers/articles/mag/0,1640,50984,00.html  

[KDR_11k]

Nintendo really halted production due to overstocking. However I doubt this overstocking happened due to "recession". Everywhere profits are rising and "recession" is merely an excuse to avoid paying employees more. It's more likely this happened due to the western ignorance towards the GC and articles bashing it like hell. Amazon in Germany even goes as far as to pretend SC2 was XB and PS2 only, to find out it's a GC game as well you have to look into the GC section. Someone needs to take a Flak Cannon to some corporate asses.

[BrianSLA]

>> maybe this is old news to the nerds here, but i havent heard this....thats quite disheartening if it is indeed true. maybe i am being too skepticle <<

Nolimit where have you been? Don't you read the articles on the frontpage of Planetgamecube? This is recent old news. Basically the news was that Nintendo had a disasterous quarter / sold only 80,000 units in a quarter and was stopping production on new Gamecubes to clear out excessive inventory.

As for console sales in general, well this week's news ( on Planetgamecube & other gaming sites ) has an article that in general, consoles sales will stagnate or recede this year. This is logical / reasonable in that this generation is getting old and the next gen is around the corner.  

[Kaj'oin]

Nintendo sold 800,000 in the 1st quarter not 80,000.geezz  

[KDR_11k]

Kaj'oin: Nope, the admins here confirmed it's really just 80k. Some pages probably thought that is too low and has to be a typo, so they made it 800k.

[BrianSLA]

YUP  80,000 units TOTAL. Not 800,000. Confirmed and the info released by Nintendo itself.  

[Michael8983]

We've been over this before.
Nintendo SHIPPED 80,000 units but a lot more than that were sold.

[mouse_clicker]

How could you sell more units than were shipped? Usually the number sold is less than the number shipped.

[AgentSeven]

Michael is correct.  The reason they sold more than they shipped is because retailers already had large backstock inventories.  Nintendo is indeed in a bit of a pinch here, but then again so is $ony and Microsoft.  Console sales and Game sales are down almost everywhere on the planet.  A war and a global recession will do that to the industry, unfortunately.

[iTZKooPA]

the 80,000 and 800,000 was mis quoted in a big gaming site, i cant remember which, besides that it was how many where shipped not sold and selling matters