Retailers scramble for Game Boy; other Nintendo products pace holiday toy parade - video games

Discount Store News, Jan 8, 1990

Retailers Scramble for Game Boy

Other Nintendo Products Pace Holiday Toy Parade

Toys "R" Us is still game enough to take on every piece of Game Boy that Nintendo could produce.

Moreover, many other chains said they want more than Nintendo will allocate to them.

Yet, a toy industry analyst said that because of tight supplies, Nintendo's new hand-held video game fell short of early expectations that it would be the best-selling toy product of the just-ended holiday season.

"We still stand by our prediction that we could sell every piece" of Game Boy that Nintendo produces this year, said Toys "R" Us vice chairman Michael Goldstein in late December.

Getting a late start on Game Boy, Nintendo was able to produce only 1.1 million sets and 3,000,000 game cartridges for Christmas 1989, said Don Coyner, advertising manager for Nintendo, compared with 9,000,000 of the regular Nintendo sets and 50,000,000 games.

"Toys "R" Us is begging us for more Game Boy," Coyner said.

For 1990, Nintendo plans to produce 5,000,000 Game Boy sets and 20,000,000 cartridges.

Goldstein declined to disclose what percentage of Game Boy production Toys "R" Us secured.

Retailers aggressively ordered Game Boy, said Paul Valentine, toy analyst for Standard & Poor's. "It was the most eagerly awaited new product this year. Everybody expected it to be a phenomenon."

Although Game Boy is a success and selling well, "it's not another Cabbage Patch," Valentine said.

Nintendo will sell every piece it can make, Valentine said. While the momentum of unmet demand means it will carry over to next year, "it's premature to look for a dramatic ramp-up of production in 1991," Valentine said.

Game Boy failed to make S&P's mid-December list of best-selling toys, Valentine said.

The list-topper was a set of action figures based on a hit Saturday morning cartoon series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The next best-selling toys were cartridges for regular Nintendo sets, "Super Mario Bros. II" and "Ninja Turtles" game cartridges. Sega's new 16-byte video game, Genesis, which retails for close to $200, followed, he said.

"The excitement in video this year is 16-byte, not hand-held," Valentine said.

Game Boy is a "terrific product," Valentine acknowledged, but price, $89.99, is a barrier. Youngsters would rather buy a couple of cartridges for regular Nintendo.

Another drawback is that its monitor is black and white, compared to the color monitor of Atari's competing hand-held game set, Lynx. (Short battery life for color prompted Nintendo to stick with black and white, Coyner said, until the power demand problem can be solved.)

"Game Boy simply isn't the hot toy this Christmas," Valentine said.

"Game Boy won't make anybody's Christmas," he said, "but it won't hurt it, either.

As another analyst pointed out, retail sales for all production of Game Boy and its cartridges would total about $160 million at retail this year, compared to $2.6 billion for regular Nintendo.

Nonetheless, Nintendo was rationing retailers before Christmas, and many chains said they wished they could buy more.

Game Boy is No. 3 on the best-selling list of Kay-Bee, Pittsfield, Mass., operator of about 800 mall stores, said spokesman Duke DeMyer. The basic Nintendo Entertainment set topped the list, while the upscale Power Set from Nintendo ranked No. 2.

"We can't keep Game Boy on the shelves," DeMyer said.

"We do have some but we expect to sell out. We could use more, perhaps twice as much," he added.

At Philadelphia-based Lionel Leisure, which operates stores primarily under the name Kiddie City, "Game Boy sells out very quickly, whenever we can get our hands on it," said Joel Weiner, director of advertising. "We're out of it for days at a time."

If Lionel could get all it wants, Game Boy probably would rank among the top five sellers, Weiner said. A shortage of product, rather than demand, though, limited Game Boy to No. 12 for the week ended Dec. 9, Weiner said.

Topping Lionel's list were: Nintendo's Entertainment Set, its Power Set, and Ninja Turtles, he said.

At Tons of Toys, Wareham, Mass.," "Game Boy isn't blowing away like the Nintendo action set," said buyer Nancy Peabody.

Sales were picking up in the final days of Christmas, though, and Tons of Toys sells out new shipments in a couple of days, Peabody said.

Nintendo's allocation is weak, Peabody said, so "we can't tell how well it would sell, if we could get as much as we want."

In Los Angeles, some of the 32 stores of Karl's Toys were sold out 10 days before Christmas, said President Joseph Chang. "Whatever we've got, we're selling well," he said. "I was skeptical at first and wish I had bought more."

Nintendo anticipated consumer demand of about 2,000,000 Game Boy sets for sell-through Christmas of '89, against total production capacity of 1,100,000 a spokeswoman said.

Nintendo expects to ship 3,000,000 game cartridges this year, she said.

Nintendo is introducing a significant number of new Game Boy cartridges at the Consumer Electronics show that concludes January 9 in Las Vegas, Nev.