Immortal on 17 February 2013
At this point, I'm nearly certain this is a planned shortage. The idea that "there aren't enough physical copies so people are downloading" already came up before with AC in Japan last year. I'm guessing those shortages were unintentional, but Nintendo probably realized that this was a great way to get people to become less download-shy considering it did that unearthly 500k downloads within the year in Japan alone.
Knowing this, Nintendo has probably decided to engineer shortages for some of its major games so that it doesn't have much difficulty in catching up to MS/Sony in terms of digital market size.
“These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.” – Groucho Marx
