When Wii U pre-orders opened in September, the console sold out less than a week later. Nintendo was rumored to have allocated as many as 400,000 units for pre-orders in North America, and those consoles have been sold out for weeks now. GameStop’s waiting list for a Wii U has surpassed 250,000 gamers<\/a>, Nintendo revealed last month.<\/p>\n

The biggest game retailer in the world, GameStop, announced last month that Wii U pre-orders were “off the charts<\/a>“. In the UK, game retailer GAME said that pre-orders were “exceeding expectations<\/a>“. And it certainly appears so, as there is no pre-order inventory anywhere. <\/p>\n

But how does the current pre-order success compare to the original Wii, which is the best selling home console in Nintendo’s history? Wii U Daily spoke to half a dozen game retailers across California, some independent establishments and some which were part of larger chains. Every single one of them reported that the Wii U currently has more pre-orders than the original Wii back in 2006. <\/p>\n

One retailer in Los Angeles told us that Wii U pre-orders are about 3:1 compared to the Wii, while others are seeing anywhere from 50 to 100 percent increase in pre-orders for the new console compared to the old. This isn’t that big of a surprise, actually, since the Wii was a new phenomenon back in 2006. Today, “Wii” is an established brand, and its easy to see the Wii U attract more pre-orders than the original console. Even if it’s highly unlikely that the Wii U will surpass the Wii in terms of total sales. <\/p>\n

When the Wii launched back in 2006, it was sold out for many months to come. If the Wii U is already getting more pre-orders, we’re likely to see shortages and sell outs once it hits the stores. Analyst Michael Pachter recently said that he too believes the Wii U will sell out<\/a> until next year, despite Nintendo manufacturing “1 million Wii U consoles per month”. <\/p>\n

Nintendo is rumored to allocate 1.5 million Wii U consoles<\/a> for North America in 2012, while shortages are expected in the UK. According to Nintendo, the UK Wii U supplies will be “tight”, with as few as 25,000 consoles available on launch day. <\/p>\n

The Wii U launches on November 18 in North America in two flavors: a $299 Basic set, and a $349 Deluxe set with a few accessories and a copy of Nintendo Land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We spoke to half a dozen video game retailers, and all report that Wii U pre-orders are exceeding those of the original Wii<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"xf_promoted_thread_id":0},"categories":[1364],"tags":[3194,3189,40,1358,1554],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53874,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7387\/revisions\/53874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daily.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}