| shoichi said: You are missing the meaning of what I am saying. lets say Nintendo shipped 10m of SNES classics at launch. But 5m ends up destroyed through some accident at sea during shipping by the shipping company (made up 'Maston'). Would that be the shipping company ('Maston') or Nintendos fault that the end result is only 5m SNES classics are up for sale at launch? In most cases this is the shipping company's fault not Nintendo who did their best to ship to customers but another company was at fault for the large loss of inventory. In a way this is the same thing as a scalper who is taking a large portion of product away from others by ordering 10's and in some cases 100's of product to resell that the average consumer won't look at, which puts blame on nintendo for lack of supply when customers look to retailers for the item. In addition just because more supply is available doesn't mean scalpers still won't grab every product they can get there hands on, because of the NES Classic effect. As it's still in demand. The only time scalping will decrease is if the items they bought dont sell for more than the MSRP they bought it at. Also if you don't believe Amazon was a huge issue..I give you this image that was a comment on Wario64's twitter. A single order, that likely other scalpers did the same (maybe not as much quantity).
Nintendo is not trying to overprice a product just because of scalpers. Companies spend time on R&D, and marketing to calculate a MSRP. That's why it's not the $150-200 you are suggesting. |
For previous pre-orders such as this, Amazon has instituted a post-sale 1 item limit.
I remember Amazon doing the same with other hot pre-orders and if UK is doing it, I expect to see reports of US as well soon. This is usually not a regional decision and I'd expect scalpers were a bigger issue in US than other areas of the world.
I fully understand your statement but I think that pricing, plentiful stock is well within the area of a manufacturer to combat scalping and demonstrate actions that are best for their customers.
I would like to point out that limited buy logic on websites isn't a fool proof mechanism. What happens in that scenario is bots appear that make buys much faster than people can and at a far higher frequency. This causes websites to be overrun as well. Remember when orders for NES Classic went up with a 2 max limit? That shit brought down several Amazon detail pages for hours. That was when Amazon started putting new stock out without notice. That is also why Switch stock replacements continued that trend and took it further by only going up behind the Prime wall.
