Nintendo has advised people to buy a Nintendo DSi early, as demand could easily outstrip supply during the busy festive period at the end of the year.
Recent Christmases have seen Nintendo's hardware top the must-have lists, with stocks of the Wii falling short of demand consistently since its release in 2006 – and it looks like it could be a similar situation with the soon to be released Nintendo DSi.
"I always advise people to buy early," Nintendo's UK general manager David Yarnton told The Times in a recent interview, picked up by gamesindustry.biz. "One of the things that people don't seem to understand is that factories are producing constantly; they don't peak and trough. So we're producing product all the time, but then everyone wants it all at the one end of the year. It's just so hard to try and keep up."
Retailers are already reporting huge demand for the new handheld, the third iteration of Nintendo's DS hardware that introduces multimedia capabilities. It's slated for an April 3 release in Europe, with a US launch coming two days after.