| shoichi said: 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. |
Supply is Nintendo's issue. Retailers are just the pipeline in which that supply is delivered. Retailers generally do put qty limits, at least they did last time I looked. However, online systems can only be so smart and scalpers do use bots as well as groups of people.
NES Classic was never easy to find. Every bit of stock that came in was gobbled up instantly. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get one much of the time and then just gave up.
Alternatively there is another solution. Put the price at the appropriate amount. People are obviously willing to pay $200. Put the price at $150. That will make scalpers rethink the risk involved, buying less, as well as still be in the realm of where folks see value benefit for the product. It would also be more in-line with the VC cost per game ($7*25=$175), especially when you include the unique hardware, new features, and games not available in VC. I'd argue this is still a customer focused change as the total price is less than VC games overall and it would allow stock to not automatically shift to scalpers.
