| superchunk said: Those of you defending NES Classic are just sad. Yes, Nintendo said it never intended to be a long-term product. However, that ignores the lack of pre-order functionality to determine overall demand as well as capitalistic mind-set to build a steady supply until sales slowed leaving the company in a far better financial footing. Then there are those of you pushing blame on to retailers vs Nintendo for SNES Classic thus far. Gamestop's forced bundles aside, retailers are limited to what Nintendo allocates and knowing how Amazon and other retailers websites crashed when they attempted to last notify ahead of time of date/time starts to pre-orders, it makes sense that like any other product they put up, they do so in low-volume time frames without notice. Facts are that you can let the initial launch of NES Classic slide a bit, but not the failure to build enough over long-term. You also cannot let any lack of supply happen for SNES Classic. There are too many proven data points this time around for Nintendo to allow a repeat of this shitty customer support. Plan to launch with 5MM. Announce that up front so people know what's coming. That initial order is more than enough to reduce cost per unit sold, lower risk in case that is over the demand of consumers (I'm sure it isn't), and put a dent in any margins available to scalpers. (btw, I'm not against the idea of buying/reselling. If people are willing to pay $200 for an $80 item, that's their money) |
This isn't Nintendo's issue though. They only control the day preorders can go up by retailers (hence Walmart's mass "early" preorder cancellations due to Nintendo), the order limit(the amount a single person can order from one account) is for the most part controlled by the retailer.
The NES Classic for a few months before it was announced to be discontinued was somewhat easy to find after the holiday season died down. Once the discontinuation was announced to be in April, Scalpers (along with just collectors for nostalgia that didn't pick one up yet, like myself) bought up all the supply they possibly can which caused the issue of them being near impossbile to get towards the closing months.
Scalpers already know the deal they had with the NES Classic. Meaning they should order as much of the supply as possible and sell it for gains of $100-200. They are trained for this because of how popular the NES Classic was. For example, if Scalpers buy up 50% of 5mm in preorder stock, that leaves for a net availability for the general public (non-scalpers) of 2.5mm in SNES Classics. It's not Nintendo's fault (outside of them being limited run products) that scalpers are lowering the amount of available stock for non-scalpers. But rather the retailer that is issuing the products for preorders without order limits, Amazon, Target, etc. As long as scalpers can make money off people that are desperate for the SNES Classic, scalpers will still continue to buy all available stock that they can.
I'm not against scalpers either, its their "job" in a sense. Just its not Nintendo's issue for how short preorders are up before they are sold out.
