The WiiU, or, How I Spent My Morning

[rpgdemon]

So, I have a WiiU premium edition now.

It's funny, since I wasn't really paying attention to the launch or anything too closely. I played it at E3, I thought NSMBU was fun, and wanted to pick one up sometime, but I didn't know when I was going to do that.

I got home for Thanksgiving on Friday, and realized that I was here right at the launch weekend. So, Saturday, I make calls, drop by places in person, to talk and figure out what's going on with the launch, if they were all pre-sold, if anyone was doing midnight releases, et cetera.

First things first: Nintendo has a huge problem with branding and awareness. The stores I went into, almost no one knew what I was talking about with the WiiU. Conversations often went something like, "Hey, do you know about the WiiU?" "You mean the Wii?" "No, Nintendo's new console, the WiiU, are you doing a midnight launch for it or anything?" "I don't know about our black friday sales for the Wii man, you need to check our flyer. Sorry."

So, I go from employee to employee, wherever they point me to, trying to find someone who knows about what's happening. None of the stores were doing midnight launches, and I found out apparently WiiU availability is tied to 3DS sales. If you sell more 3DS XLs, you get more WiiUs in stock.

So, finally, I get some "straight" answers out of a guy. After he was talking about the 3DS XL stuff, he said he couldn't disclose numbers for how many they got in stock. I had to ask, essentially, "So, how long would the line have to be in order for me to just leave", to get any answer out of him, and he said around 20 people in line, but some of those might be pre-buys. It turned out that the store had 7 premiums, and 7 non-premiums. The attendant also was helpful in saying that a Walmart down the road was rumored to have much more than them, coming in.

So, I now had to get somewhere and camp out in front of the store really early in the morning, instead of getting it at night and going to bed. I figure 5:00 AM was when the rush would come, I'd get there a bit before that, everything would be good. I was entirely right. I got there at 4:20ish, and was the first in line, and the only person until around 4:40-4:50.

At around 7:30, a store attendant came outside to give us tickets to get the WiiU, and I got my ticket, with a little 1 on it, saying that I was able to buy a WiiU delux. Long story short, I went in, got it, and now have it sitting in it's box, waiting to be opened.

So, I really want to write some sort of journalistic article about the whole thing, since there is a lot more story to tell, and a lot more to dig into about the distribution and really soft launch of the WiiU, as well as the branding issues. But the important thing is: The WiiU is here.