Nintendo could become the big winner of the upcoming holiday shopping season. The Wii was originally planned to be in a fierce competition with Sony's PS3, but last month Sony announced that production issues forced a huge cutback of the launch allocation for North America. Only 400,000 units will be available when the PS3 is released on 17 November 17. 500,000 consoles will be launched worldwide. Nintendo claims that it will ship four million Wii units to all major countries on their respective release dates, with the bulk going to the U.S.

At least in theory, this scenario indicates that many PS3 hopefuls could end up buying a Nintendo Wii.