Ron Bertram, vice president and general manager of Nintendo of Canada, has stated that one million Wii consoles will be available for the North American launch on November 19. Previously, Nintendo has stated that they will have four million units shipped out before the end of the year, but never announced where the consoles would be available. Along with the consoles, Nintendo has stated that they will have 30 titles available by the end of the year. How many of the titles will actually be good? Who knows? But at least we’ll have a bunch to choose from.
As for the holiday breakdown – we’ve got 400,000 PS3s and 1,000,000 Nintendo Wiis. There’s going to be a lot of disappointed people this year. If both Nintendo and Sony can actually deliver the numbers they are giving us by the end of the year (which probably won’t happen), at least they’ll be able cheer up gamers by Christmas. What we certainly don’t need is another half-year shortage like Microsoft faced last year.
1 Million For Wii [gamasutra]