| Mandalore76 said: No matter how many times this gets said, I think people put way too much belief in it. I think there are far less sinister motives to some of the stock issues in Nintendo's history. Take the amiibos for example, with so many characters in production, would it have been prudent for Nintendo to massively over produce something like the Wii Fit Trainer amiibo? As for the Classics, they could have sold way more than Nintendo produced, but the limited supply had nothing to do with manufacturing artificial demand. To Nintendo, the Classics were just intended to be a niche item from an intended limited production run from the get go. Artificial scarcity only makes sense if you intend to manipulate it to sell more units that you wouldn't have previously been able to sell. But, I think it's pretty clear that Nintendo could have sold way more than the entirety of what they ended up producing. It's just not an item that they ever intended to have in production for a long term period of time. If Nintendo is such a specialist at creating "artificial hype through designed scarcity", why didn't they attempt this with 2 of there worst performing consoles? With the launch of both the Gamecube and the Wii U, Nintendo produced more units, not less, than previous launches. In my opinion, this is just one of those myths that gets passed around the internet so much that people assume it must be true. As for the Switch, I think they produced as many as they could for the year, and just came up short of being able to supply demand the same as every other console manufacturer this holiday. |
With regard to Amiibo's, it isn't even like they didn't produce a lot of amiibo's anyway. There was just a lot of demand. In one and a half years they managed to manufacture 32 million Amiibo's. How was Nintendo supposed to guess that the Amiibo's (who were designed to take functionality with the Wii U natively) would outsell the console almost 3:1 in less than two years?
With regard to the NES Classic...the popularity of plug and play consoles was very minimal. Atari and Sega had tapped into the market with AtGames manufacturing the units to little mainstream success. Nintendo does it and it blows up selling more than the PS4 or Xbox One did in June 2018 in the US despite only being available for one day in that month and on a re-release from it's original launch in 2017 no less. The SNES Classic was even more successful than the NES Classic as well. Then we look at the competitors that tapped the market (including Sega's most recent Genesis, which is quality, and the PS1 classic)...and you simply don't see that level of hype or success. In Japan PS1 classic sold 1/3rd the amount that the SNES did in the same time and was heavily discounted to $60 then $40, then $20 in the States. Nintendo just created an incredibly successful product and nobody else has managed that same success in that plug and play market even after it's potential was shown.
