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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Do you ACTUALLY believe that Nintendo is creating artifical Switch shortages?

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Aeolus451 said:
Yes. Mainly because I don't believe in coincidences of this size with businesses. You're not gonna have shortages (wii, nes classic, amiibo, switch, ds, etc) for as long as Nintendo does and with this many of their products. The people responsible would eventually lose their job over it if it kept happening. Artificial shortages, artificial scarcity and managed scarcity (whatever you want to call it) is a known business tactic and nintendo has been doing it for awhile. Having shortages once in a blue moon is one thing but it repeatedly happening with all of their popular products is quite another.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/13/15294494/nintendo-nes-classic-edition-console-discontinued-strategy

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/109643/Opinion_Why_Artificial_Scarcity_Could_Boost_Digital_Game_Downloads.php

https://www.engadget.com/2007/03/27/wii-shortage-is-intentional-according-to-gamestop/

http://n4g.com/news/2014325/gamestop-and-target-cancelling-some-switch-pre-orders-due-to-shortages

Yes you can have shortages for something that sells 20mil+ each year and something that was planned as a novelty item and made only a couple million only for it to blow up and even outsell current consoles in its last month. 

And haha hahaha people actually believe ninty is some nefarious company purposefully screwing itself and its customers. I mean ninty made 2.74mil consoles in March. 2.74mil in a month is an amazing feat and that's not called short supplies especially considering this was their best console launch month even more than the Wii. We then hear stories how Ninty is using freaking AIRPLANES to meet demand in USA. Why would a company who purposefully restricts supply do that. Then in May it sells less than a ps4 even though demand is clearly there. I would assume they would not reduce it that much as to loose face by selling less than a 4 year old console and at least bare minimum keep it above that number. And as consumers have shown they are willing to buy from scalpers for more money. Ninty is loosing all those sales right there since it demand was met they would have sold twice the consoles one for the scalper and other for the consumer and made a hell of a lot if money but no their evil sells just wanted consumers to buy expensive products from people ninty doesn't even know about just for the hell of it. Sure ninty looses money and sales but ninty is pure evil right? Yeah when you think of Ninty as a company it makes zero sense for creating false shortages and they are literally loosing sales and money the longer shortages continue. Anyone who believes otherwise just really hates Ninty or is really gullible to believe a company would do stupid stuff like that which actually harms them and their consumer and only random scalpers benefit



Just a guy who doesn't want to be bored. Also

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Some people after Wii U dont believe that Nintendo is so popular that can make shortages, so they are easier to believe that Nintendo is making artificial shortages, which is of course nonsense.



No I don't. I think they're shortages because they launched the Switch in so many countries around the world and need to meet that demand. They are ramping up supply pretty quickly and doing much better at pumping out the consoles than they did with the Wii and Wii U. If I recall right AMD had some supply issues a few years back and I wonder if this is part of the reason Nintendo decided to look to Nvidia moving forward.

Now if I recall correctly Nintendo may have created shortages with the Wii. At least a lot of things seemed to point to so. Though if that is the case I don't think they ever created a scenario like that again. It was a great marketing trick that made many people mentally jump on the Wii band wagon. Neither the Wii U nor the Switch are nearly as a underpowered as the Wii was for their times.




pokoko said:
KLAMarine said:

Anything about purposeful undersupplying that resulted in legal charges?

I dunno but you can look it up yourself if you want.

You think searching up "nintendo artifical scarcity court legal" is a good starting point?..

https://www.bing.com/search?q=nintendo+artificial+scarcity+court+legal&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&pq=nintendo+artificial+scarcity+court+legal&sc=0-0&sk=&cvid=9680A46204CD495C92AFED8B13B64CC2



pokoko said:
Cloudman said:

I heard a reason some games had shortages back in the NES era was due to a shortage of chips at the time. I figure things were different then when it came to gaming as well.

Which is true.  However, it's happened so often with Nintendo--from consoles, to cartridges, to Amiibo, to mini consoles--that the perception has grown.  And I'm not entirely convinced that Nintendo could not have done more in some cases to either prepare for or meet unexpected demand.

Aeolus451 said:
Yes. Mainly because I don't believe in coincidences of this size with businesses. You're not gonna have shortages (wii, nes classic, amiibo, switch, ds, etc) for as long as Nintendo does and with this many of their products. The people responsible would eventually lose their job over it if it kept happening. Artificial shortages, artificial scarcity and managed scarcity (whatever you want to call it) is a known business tactic and nintendo has been doing it for awhile. Having shortages once in a blue moon is one thing but it repeatedly happening with all of their popular products is quite another.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/13/15294494/nintendo-nes-classic-edition-console-discontinued-strategy

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/109643/Opinion_Why_Artificial_Scarcity_Could_Boost_Digital_Game_Downloads.php

https://www.engadget.com/2007/03/27/wii-shortage-is-intentional-according-to-gamestop/

http://n4g.com/news/2014325/gamestop-and-target-cancelling-some-switch-pre-orders-due-to-shortages

But does not happens with main products, if we look only Wii had also huge shortages like Switch, and Wii was fastest selling console ever. Also you need to take in account that with Wii U Nintendo has huge stocks that didn't sell at all and they later didn't could lower price for Wii U, so with Switch they planned less stocks, but demand was much bigger than they thought it wi'll be and increasing production takes time.

 

 

Dark_Feanor said:
This has been Nintendo stratregy since the early 80s. 

There are books and news reports about it. 


Really!? Gave us links of some of those reports for Nintendo main products. Reality is that only Wii had also huge shortages like Switch and Wii was fastest selling console ever while Switch has best start for Nintendo consoles.



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There's no way of knowing the answer.

+

It's entirely reasonable and is within the realm of believable marketing strategy.

(Any more questions?)



TruckOSaurus said:

Well do you?

i've seen it said time and time again in various sales threads but I somehow can't bring myself to believe some people actually believe it. I mean, I could understand saying it to rile up Nintendo fans, it's surprisingly effective and fun but not actually believing it.

To be clear, I'm not talking about Nintendo setting aside units for big release weeks, I'm talking about people who really think Nintendo has loads of Switch consoles hiding somewhere and they're not shipping them to retailers who are begging for supply just because they want game sites to publish articles about stock issues.

To me that is pretty crazy but who knows maybe some users here can make sense of it?

Do you ACTUALLY believe in the holocaust?

Well do you?

To be clear, I'm not talking about the Nazis being responsible for the death of millions of jews, I'm talking about people who really think Adolf Hitler was a time traveller from planet Melmac who personally killed all the jews while wearing a pink and yellow striped mini-skirt and a giant penis-shaped tampon on his head, just because he wanted international newspapers to publish articles about him.

So there you have it: the holocaust (that is, as per my extremely limited definition) didn't happen, only an insane person would believe something that crazy.

Seriously: you're basically trying to prove that there is no "artificial Switch shortage" by limiting "artificial Switch shortage" to a very narrow and indeed rather unrealistic definition.

"Setting aside units for big release weeks" would obviously already be a case of storing "Switch console somewhere and not shipping them to retailers who a begging for supply". Furthermore, the idea that a manufacturer would drive production at the maximum and store all the excess units in warehouses doesn't make much sense to me; a manufacturer who indeed wanted to use an artificial scarcity strategy would probably rather not drive production at the possible maximum instead.

And to those suggesting that artificial shortages wouldn't possibly make any sense, because of "birds in the hand" etc.: "Artifical scarcity" exists, intentionally keeping supply below demand is a well-known strategy in marketing etc. If you don't see any possible reasons why a sane manufacturer would possibly do something like that, chances are you just don't know that much about economics.

I'm not saying that Nintendo is indeed (still) intentionally keeping supply below demand (I neither know nor really care), but it's not that hard to think of possible reasons why Nintendo might consider doing so for a limited period of time.



No, going by the sales numbers NS is probably going to be at around 5m by the end of this month that doesn't sound like an artificial shortage to me as that's extremely fast.



Eagle367 said:
Aeolus451 said:
Yes. Mainly because I don't believe in coincidences of this size with businesses. You're not gonna have shortages (wii, nes classic, amiibo, switch, ds, etc) for as long as Nintendo does and with this many of their products. The people responsible would eventually lose their job over it if it kept happening. Artificial shortages, artificial scarcity and managed scarcity (whatever you want to call it) is a known business tactic and nintendo has been doing it for awhile. Having shortages once in a blue moon is one thing but it repeatedly happening with all of their popular products is quite another.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/13/15294494/nintendo-nes-classic-edition-console-discontinued-strategy

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/109643/Opinion_Why_Artificial_Scarcity_Could_Boost_Digital_Game_Downloads.php

https://www.engadget.com/2007/03/27/wii-shortage-is-intentional-according-to-gamestop/

http://n4g.com/news/2014325/gamestop-and-target-cancelling-some-switch-pre-orders-due-to-shortages

Yes you can have shortages for something that sells 20mil+ each year and something that was planned as a novelty item and made only a couple million only for it to blow up and even outsell current consoles in its last month. 

And haha hahaha people actually believe ninty is some nefarious company purposefully screwing itself and its customers. I mean ninty made 2.74mil consoles in March. 2.74mil in a month is an amazing feat and that's not called short supplies especially considering this was their best console launch month even more than the Wii. We then hear stories how Ninty is using freaking AIRPLANES to meet demand in USA. Why would a company who purposefully restricts supply do that. Then in May it sells less than a ps4 even though demand is clearly there. I would assume they would not reduce it that much as to loose face by selling less than a 4 year old console and at least bare minimum keep it above that number. And as consumers have shown they are willing to buy from scalpers for more money. Ninty is loosing all those sales right there since it demand was met they would have sold twice the consoles one for the scalper and other for the consumer and made a hell of a lot if money but no their evil sells just wanted consumers to buy expensive products from people ninty doesn't even know about just for the hell of it. Sure ninty looses money and sales but ninty is pure evil right? Yeah when you think of Ninty as a company it makes zero sense for creating false shortages and they are literally loosing sales and money the longer shortages continue. Anyone who believes otherwise just really hates Ninty or is really gullible to believe a company would do stupid stuff like that which actually harms them and their consumer and only random scalpers benefit

Whoever said that? 

Do some research on artificial scarcity or managed scarcity before you dismiss it so casually. As I said before, long lasting repeated shortages of multiple products is not a coincidence. Since I'm gonna give the ninty the benefit of the doubt and not assume their a bunch idiots who can't manage how to produce enough product to meet demand (like you guys do), they're purposely limiting the production of their more popular products. It's a smart strategy if scarcity is controlled in a manner that increases demand, creates "sold out" headlines, sells through all stock as fast as possible, etc. 

Seriously, this is what's annoying and mindboggling about this topic. Most ninty fans say that it doesn't make sense that ninty would use this business practice but instead keeps having shortages due to popularity. There's couple of hilarous problems with that excuse. 

1. You're basically saying that ninty is not smart enough to do it on purpose but rather the repeated and lengthy shortages (with multiple products) are due to ninty's incompetence with being unable to figure how to produce enough product to meet demand.

2. The popularity part of the excuse is especially bogus. Ninty products don't exactly outsell it's competition and yet the competition manages to outsell ninty the majority of the time and not have shortages over and over except around a certain holiday season sometimes. Also, this isn't a valid excuse when the same product has shortages throughout the whole year and for years after. I can understand a company not anticapating how popular their product will be and having shortages for about a year after because of that but that excuse doesn't apply after they had plenty of time to adjust to the demand. 

3. There's alot of articles on this and people from the world of gaming saying that ninty is likely used managed scarcity or artificial scarcity since NES because the repeated and lengthy shortages can't be explained outside incompetence or using that business practice. Neither Sony or MS have shortages like ninty does. 



It's unfortunate that the Wii U's legacy is hurting the switch, they would have manufactured more Switches if it was successful, I'm still waiting to receive my switch. :( Breath of the wild is just sitting in my room gathering dust.



Sales prediction, PS4: 122 Million, Xbox one: 50 million, Switch: 105 million.