Not saying I like what they are doing but to me, it makes more sense than purposely doing it to so call "raise hype." If they have too much inventory lying around, specially during the holidays, they have to pay the fees until someone buys them. This becomes a bigger factor during holidays since shelf space is at a premium since everyone wants to be on there. Having something sell out is better for them as a business than overestimating something and let it sit there instead. Same goes for ordering a lot and not selling enough. 

Also considering how much they goofed the wiiU after the remarkable sales of the wii, I am not really surprised

Nintendo must have the ability to gauge the interest and demand of their products (mind you, i'm not an analyst of any sort) so it's hard to believe they would understock so harshly due to lack of information or being extremely cautious. I gotta agree with Jim on this one, i'm thinking its more on purpose.

I understand that in some cases companies may underestimate the demand for a product, but like Jim said in the video, numerous different sites predicted well ahead of launch that the supply would not reach demand with the NES classic, so Nintendo should have been very well aware of it as well, and you really can't tell me that providing less than ten of them per store is Nintendo's genuine estimate for the console's demand.

People seem to think Nintendo can indeed predict the future and then use this awesome ability to lose money somehow .

Stefan.De.Machtige said: People seem to think Nintendo can indeed predict the future and then use this awesome ability to lose money somehow .

Everyone knew there was going to be Nes Classic shortages apart from Nintendo? So apprently Nintendo are actually the only ones that can't predict the future.

Fortunately for me they only seem to do this for products I couldn't care less about. :L

My own personal opinion is that Nintendo refuses to over-manufacture. They'd much rather have customers go wanting than end up with a vast surplus. I don't really believe in the "trying to create buzz" idea because it doesn't really make any sense. A a business you'd much rather actually sell your product than have people want your product but not be able to give you the money. If it's a by-product of under-shipping, however, then I think Nintendo would be very happy with that.

This is classic Nintendo, to be honest. In the NES era, they were accused to killing developers because they'd manufacture far less cartridges than developers requested and that title would be completely sold out by the end of the year. It's part of their business culture.

I'm a small videogame shop owner in Italy. I want to let you know more about how it works Nintendo. It's stupid because, because of this behaviour they lost lot of sales.

Christmas 2010, Art Academy DS came out in november, then at the end of the month Nintendo started do advertise it (I'm talking about Italy) but in the while they weren't shipping it into stores, they spended money to advertise a game that they didn't sent to store. People went crazy about this game, on eBay there were pieces at about 99 euros (29,99 was the suggested price) they didn't ship the game for the holidays, so people bought something other and when they finally decide to sent the game to stores (March 2011, 3 months later) nobody cares anymore about art academy. They lost an incredible amount of sales (and money).

Same with the NES Mini: The console was announced this summer, I call my supplier and placed a total of 150 units of the machine, and 140 pieces of the controller.

D1 I received: 12 NES mini and 4 controllers. To now I've received 4 more units of the console and zero controllers. I'm starting buying it from the other stores just to give them to my customers (I buy them at 60 euros and re-sell them to 60 euros, with no profit for me and this was the biggest launch if this year, totally burned).

This way of work it's totally insane and nosense. I've spent hours in phones and chat with my customers who preordered the NES mini since this summer to explain them that probably they won't have it for Christmas.

(sorry for my bad english)

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Explain that comment to us.

Nintendo and 3rd party in a nutshell.