Wii Wars - It's Only A Game To Some, But Livelihoods To Others

I blogged months ago about my experiences with HMV and pre-orders of the Wii Console. I was resonsible for at least 1,500 sales of the consoles for various different merchants before I stopped last December. I was annoyed then, and I'm annoyed now!

Demand is high and traffic to Wii retailers is also high. But for Game (who I've respected for a while)to come out with this email is just takes the biscuit!

As I'm sure you are aware, the Nintendo Wii is in huge demand this Christmas. The volume of traffic being driven to our site via our Wii affiliates has been staggering and has put the site under incredible pressure. It is imperative that we maintain the stability of our site and as a result we have decided to pause affiliate activity on all Wii hardware sales. This is not a long term solution and will look to reactivate the commission payments as soon as we can.

To confirm how this will work, as of today Game will no longer batch back confirmed commissions of the Nintendo Wii to either TradeDoubler or Buy.at. With respect to this we ask that you discontinue your promotions of the Wii until we are able to reinstate the commissions.

Just tell the truth! You don't need affiliates to drive Wii sales as you're getting enquiries already! No-one else has much stock so you're not loosing customers so why should you be paying affiliates to drive traffic promoting Wii's when the user will buy games anyway? To blame it on your servers is utter rubbish!

If your servers can't cope sack your IT department, don't slap the people that drive your sales in the face. As we won't come back!

If you look at Alexa (ok so it's not totally accurate) you're getting as much traffic this year as last. You had stock then so were happy for the customers, but now you don't need us any more!