I think Jay-Z said it best. Mo’ Money. Mo’ Problems. Didn’t Jay-Z say that? I don’t keep up with you kids. From Nextgen:

Nintendo sold 981,000 Wii units in the US during November according to the NPD Group, but according to James Lin, senior analyst at the MDB Capital Group in Santa Monica, Calif., “they could easily sell double what they’re selling.” Along with other industry analysts and retailers, Lin believes Nintendo could be set to lose out on more than $1billion this holiday, not including missed revenue opportunities from associated software sales that won’t materialize.

Man. That sucks for Nintendo. They could be taking over the world, but because they can’t make enough systems (wink, wink) they won’t make nearly as much money as they could be. So sad! Hang on. Where’s my tissue? For all you people looking for a Wii, head to Bestbuy and grab the one I won’t be buying. Its waiting on you.

[via NextGen]

Jayslacks.

I refuse to write another technical dissertation on the memory constraints and properties of the various next gen consoles so soon after the last one, so this is going to take it easy in that regard. Anyway. Activision, the publisher with the rights to games based on the Spiderman property (both film and comic, I believe), handed the development duties for their film tie-in Spiderman 3 to Treyarch, their most competent team. They’re responsible for the Tony Hawk series, Gun, and Call of Duty 3.

Stop laughing.

Now, this would have been a good choice, as Treyarch has as much experience as (if not more than) anyone in doing multiplatform games during the current console generation, as the last Tony Hawk game and Call of Duty game can attest to. Unfortunately, it would seem that someone was asleep at the wheel during the title’s development cycle. The 360 was serving as the lead development platform, which makes sense, given it’s install base advantage, and unfortunately, those console differences I talked about yesterday slipped someone important’s mind:

The initial intention of Activision was to have the Spider-Man 3 movie tie-in game out a month ahead of the movie’s release, evidently. But when it turned out that, one month before ship date, the game was still gobbling up RAM as though every console was an Xbox 360, the company panicked. According to the Conference Fonz’s inside source, Activision had to halt all other publisher-side Q/A work in order to get this turd ready for market before the movie arrives tomorrow.
Thus, nothing else could get through the company’s Q/A department in April.

Ouch. I don’t know that Activision had anything else big coming out last month, but I’m thinking that’s the kind of mistake that might get the project lead (I think) into some deep doodoo. Unemployment line standing doodoo, as a matter of fact. Anyway, let that be a lesson to everyone that storage space and a hard drive aren’t the only things developers have to worry about this gen.

-Aegies