I should point out that not all Wii owners are stupid sheep, just the ones paying huge markups to get the latest widget from the folks at Nintendo.
The Wii has been in (artificially?) short supply since it’s release almost 1.5 years ago, and this week Nintendo released Wii Fit; which is apparently also hard to buy… at least in stores. At Amazon and eBay you can get a Wii Fit for prices as high as $500. In fact eBay currently lists almost 7000 results for Wii Fit.
While I understood the rush to obtain the Wii console itself (christmas season), the Wii Fit doesn’t deserve this kind of hype. Currently only 2 games support the peripheral: the bundled game and We Ski (which is supposed to be only OK). Furthermore the packed in game is probably of only limited entertainment for most younger gamers. If the Wii itself is any indication it’s going to take game developers a while to make more than cursory use of the Wii Fit Balance Board as a controller, so I don’t see this situation improving in the next 2-3 months.
My intuition is that the majority of stock in Wii Fit has gone to pre-orders and a significant number of those are now up on eBay. Driven by scarcity and hype people (parents?) are paying stupid prices to get a device that will probably languish in their basements within a couple of months.
I’d like a copy of Wii Fit. I need to lose weight and any gadget that gets me to focus on my health is good. But I’m not going to pay more than MSRP ($90 is already high for the device), and I encourage others to do the same. As long as people are willing to shell out premium prices for the latest gizmo, the speculators (and manufacturers) are going to create artificial market conditions to their benefit.