Wii shortage coming to an end?

A year and a half into its American availability, shortages for the Nintendo Wii may, finally, be coming to an end. One reporter thinks he knows why it's taken so long for the Wii to make its way back to the place it hasn't seen much of: actual store shelves. The blame, says Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News, falls squarely at the foot of a weak U.S. dollar.

The theory, developed with a game-industry analyst, is a pretty simple one. Nintendo is a Japanese company, but when it sells consoles in the U.S. it is paid for them in dollars and then has to convert them to yen. With exchange rates for dollars hitting record lows, Nintendo has been making less and less on each Wii sold in America. Only four months ago, a $300 Wii would net about 35,000 yen. Today that's fallen to about 29,000 yen, a drop of about 20 percent.

Exchange rates have fared better in Europe (though the yen is down against the euro, too), so Nintendo, the theory goes, has opted to ship consoles there (and, presumably, sell them at home) instead of marketing them here.

Makes perfect sense, really. But why would the shortage be ending? Because demand in Europe, it's said, is finally falling, as Germans and Frenchmen have finally gotten their fill of Wii Bowling. The expectation is that later this year, American Wii supplies will finally start to increase as Europe demands fewer machines. Less certain, but equally hoped-for, is that by that time the U.S. dollar will stop its slide and become a more attractive currency for exporters like Nintendo, too. We'll see about that.

See, gamers? It pays to pay attention in economics.