With Christmas just around the corner the same situation looks like emerging this year as it did last year in relation to the Nintendo Wii. Everyone will want one, but you’ll struggle to find one anywhere. Stocks will be extremely limited and you’ll have to order one early if you’re intending on playing with one on Christmas morning.

So why are they so limited? Has Nintendo go it badly wrong and continually underestimated the demand for its motion sensing consol?

Some analysts, like Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan, believe Nintendo have failed to anticipate the success of their Wii.

Clearly they failed to anticipate the demand that they got.

However the real reason may be something more sinister. Perhaps Nintendo are deliberately keeping in short supply in order to fuel the demand for it. After all, if you could walk into any high street store and buy one off the shelves, would it have the interest it has now?

The website ‘Geeksugar’ wrote on its blog in May this year:

Conspiracy theorists are saying that since Nintendo has already met their end of March goals (with 6 million units shipped), and are building up supply, continuing the demand, and ensuring awesome second quarter sales. Unfortunately, with American retailers now running at 2.5 percent availability, some are expecting the Wii shortage to continue through 2009.

However still Michael Pachter insists that Nintendo made a mistake. He claims they underestimated demand and the price of their consol, as nobody at Nintendo could have predicted that demand for the Wii would outstrip demand for the PS3. Least of all Sony themselves.

I think that Nintendo, figuring that their technology was kind of last generation, were just not just thinking about going higher than $300. They certainly could have charged $400 until they exhausted that demand, then cut the prices to $300 and exhausted that demand, and they always would have been able to supply them.

It never occurred to them that the demand for the Wii would outstrip demand for the PS2. It didn’t even sound possible. It didn’t sound possible to anybody.