You get a Switch,
you get a Switch, and…you don’t
By all accounts Nintendo should be on top of the world right now.
The Switch released to high sales, Breath
of the Wild received near universal critical acclaim, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is selling like hotcakes despite being just a
Wii U port, and Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey have quickly become
two of the year’s most anticipated games.
But notice that I said
should. While they’re still riding the high wave of glory that always comes
with the successful launch of any product, they’ve put themselves in the news
time and time again for the past few months for a problem fans have been
complaining about for years now.
That’s right, it’s time
to talk about everyone’s favourite subject: Nintendo’s supply-and-demand problem.
I briefly touched upon
this topic in my editorial where I talked about how buying games has become
unnecessarily overcomplicated (check it out here if you haven’t!), but recent
events really made me feel that the time had finally come to really take a
closer look at what Nintendo’s doing.
This problem began around
early 2015 after the first few waves of amiibo had been released. Without
warning, Nintendo announced that figures of some of the less popular characters
would be discontinued. This led several casual collectors of amiibo scrambling,
following sale charts and shipments to try and find the plastic figure of their
desire. It got to a point where Nintendo decided to make basically every amiibo impossible to find thanks
to a laughably low stock, including the first wave of Splatoon amiibo.
Eventually we all
breathed a sigh of relief as Nintendo started to be more reasonable with amiibo
stock as the craze died out towards the end of the year, but little did we know
that the Big N was planning a double sucker punch just one year later.
Without a hot Wii U title
to sell during the lucrative holiday season, Nintendo played their ultimate
trump card: nostalgia. The NES Classic was the result, a Plug-and-Play
miniature version of the 1985 console that quickly became the bane of gamers
and collectors existence. Nintendo somehow managed to stock the thing worse
than even the hardest to find amiibo, with some stores receiving shipments of
the mini-consoles in the single digits. To date, I’ve never seen one in person.
It might as well not exist for me.
“Oh well,” people said.
“Nintendo said it was a collector’s item after all. I guess I’ll use this money
I saved on the Switch.”
They say bad things come
in threes, and Nintendo decided to pull their bait-and-switch move yet again,
only this time it was with their brand new headliner console. Switches have
become notoriously hard to find, while thankfully not as bad as NES Classics.
It’s kind of hard to make a console that’s supposed to revive an entire company
when nobody can find the damn thing.
But of course it couldn’t
end there. Nintendo finally delivered the knockout punch last month when they
announced the NES Classic had been discontinued, less than half a year after it
was first released. Their reason? “We don’t have infinite resources.”
There are rumours that
they’re doing this to start production on a SNES Classic due for release this
November, but at this point those are still just rumours. Even if they’re true,
it doesn’t take away from how scummy it is to introduce a console, barely make
any, and then discontinue it while people are still trying to get them.
This of course leads to
people buying NES Classics and Switches from scalpers at ludicrous prices, leaving
nobody happy except for the guy who bought 10 Wii Fit Trainer amiibo when they
came out and put them up on eBay for $300 a pop. Nintendo doesn’t make any
extra money off their products being resold, and obviously consumers don’t want
to spend more than the suggested retail price.
Nintendo sincerely needs
to drop this “collector’s item” idea they got when amiibo made it big. When
someone mentions a “collector’s item” to me, I don’t think of something that is
literally impossible to find and requires midnight pre-orders and travelling
the area like a wandering adventurer in hopes you’ll find what you’re looking
for to get it. I think of something with a limited release that has a lot of
stock so everyone who’s interested in this once-in-a-lifetime product can get
their hands on one easily. While I may love travelling great distances
searching for rare items in Breath of the
Wild, that joy doesn’t translate to the real world, Nintendo.
Song
of the Week
Mute City – Mario Kart 8
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