Oh you better believe it! I won’t go into details, but for some this shit is serious, y’know?
I’m betting that licensing is to blame. Nintendo sold the NES Classic for less than the price of 30 NES games on Virtual Console. Someone (probably Square-Enix or Konami) got upset when it sold like gangbusters and wanted a bigger cut. We’ll see what happens if they do an SNES one. I bet it sells for closer to $100 than $60 next time around.
Obviously it is Konami.
From Reggie: 2.3 million units of the NES Classic were sold total.
[quote]
“We had originally planned for this to be a product for last holiday,” Fils-Aimé told TIME. “We just didn’t anticipate how incredible the response would be. Once we saw that response, we added shipments and extended the product for as long as we could to meet more of that consumer demand.”[/quote]
[quote]
“Even with that extraordinary level of performance, we understand that people are frustrated about not being able to find the system, and for that we really do apologize,” he said. “But from our perspective, it’s important to recognize where our future is and the key areas that we need to drive. We’ve got a lot going on right now and we don’t have unlimited resources.”[/quote]
For our perspective, it is important for us to stop selling products with an “extraordinary level of importance” and sow distrust amongst our biggest fans.
Are you listening to yourself talk Nintendo?
It was TOO popular we had to stop selling it.
Think Geek had these available bundled with a bunch of garbage they couldn’t sell today for 140 to 220 dollars a bundle today.
Somehow they “found” a cache of these that went unsold since production ended in April. This is some gamestop level b.s.
Gamestop owns Think Geek now, so it’s exactly gamestop level BS.
I think the most amazing part is they put this in the listing. A $219 bundle with a foam hat seems so nice of them:
But wait. There’s more. Literally. With your super-awesome, hard-to-find, not-marked-up-on-eBay NES Classic Edition you’re going to score some bonus Nintendo goodies. What kind of goodies? This kind:
Man, fuck these guys right in the ear.
Wow, all you have to do to not be a scumbag scalper (and probably violate your agreement with the original manufacturer to not sell their products for more than MSRP) is to bundle a “collectible” item along with the thing that has actual value.
Nice to know. Will be bundling a collectible Abe Lincoln copper-colored mini-medallion with all future items marked up 300% or more. Chain not included.
Oh I fully know they are owned by Gamestop, I am sure my friend who is a manager of one will be happy to learn that his company held onto extra stock while he was getting angry calls from moms and dads about buying one.
Gamestop quite literally scalped these themselves.
And, while it was a shitty thing to do… why everyone else didn’t do the same thing is also crazy. Amazon could have sold theirs at 100 bucks a pop and made out just fine.
I guess we can know that there was no collusion on their part.
Mom and pop game stores and comic book shops do this kind of thing all the time. When you get in some super rare stuff, you sell it on ebay for a markup, and tell customers “you didn’t get any in stock” and they will blame Nintendo or Marvel for not making enough.
Nintendo is clearly largely to blame here, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of those scalpers are distributors and smaller retailers looking to make a lot more money. We are talking the insanity that is a 400% markup on the MSRP being the going rate on Ebay, if I was working in a shitty retail situation, I could definitely see a way to maybe buying a couple at cost before the store sells them, and flip them on ebay.
This is a really shitty situation that I desperately hope Nintendo and retailers fix with the SNES classic, because I think the demand will be even greater.
This is why, when working with these smaller stores, these companies should be operating under something like Wizards of the Coast’s Wizards Play Network model, where if you aren’t a member store at a certain tier of the program, you simply don’t get that exclusive product, and if you’re caught doing things like selling your limited supply of promo and otherwise short-run product online instead of distributing it in-store as intended, they’ll drop you faster than you can say “roll for initiative.”
As for why Amazon in particular didn’t sell the NES Classic at a mark-up, I’m pretty sure that as a vendor, they’re already on thin ice with Nintendo because their tendencies to mark down software and hardware are at odds with Nintendo’s insistence on selling games at full price for years after release. In the face of the success of the NES Classic and the Switch, I imagine they’d rather not have a repeat of what happened with the 3DS, where they were seemingly blocked from stocking any system models directly for years.
I’d be surprised if Amazon cared about that at all. Consoles are low margin, games are better but still not great. And they sold a heck of a lot of 3DS games. Better to let 3d party sellers fill that niche than let Nintendo call the shots. Not being on Amazon is more of a punishment to the OEM than to Amazon.
It’s more a PR thing than a profit thing. Amazon wouldn’t go out of business overnight or anything if they stopped being allowed to carry Nintendo products, but it’d certainly look bad if they were the only vendor not carrying something as hot as the NES Classic, the Switch, or the SNES Classic, especially if it happened because they were directly selling something that was already incredibly hard to find above MSRP (which itself would simply look bad, regardless of Nintendo’s response).
The big retailers are too busy doing other things than running around trying to get scalp prices on specific SKUs. It’s also sleazy and not worth the PR hit for it.
It is not the retailers themselves, outside of gamestop, pulling this shit, it is the mid level managers and store owners. Let a couple slip through the cracks and sell em on the side.
Gamestop has been pulling this bundle shit for years now. But to wait months and sell bundles at 2-3 times the asking price is just shameful.
True Gamestop story: They recently got a restock of Link Amiibos. Each retailer had an exclusive Link, Gamestop’s was Skyward Sword. I show up at my local Gamestop in Malden when they open at 10am, having checked their website to confirm that store did indeed have stock. The worker, who claimed to be the manager, said they were all on hold for a woman in Beverly, MA. (that’s far away). I tried to call bullshit on him, but he wouldn’t budge. So I had him give me the district manager’s phone number.
I called all the other Gamestops in the surrounding towns, all of them told me yes we have stock but they’re on hold. One Gamestop in Wilmington told me “I have one. You’re not the first person to call. I’m keeping it behind the counter for the first person to get here. We’re not allowed to hold them for people.” By that time my wife had left with the car, though, so I couldn’t get out there to pick it up.
I called that district manager and left a message with the dude’s name from my local store, what the guy in Wilmington said, and my suspicion that the other store employees were scalping them on eBay. The next day I get a call from my local Gamestop saying they had one on hold for me and I could come pick it up whenever.
So, I don’t know what to make of this other than they wanted me to shut up and go away so they could continue flipping rare Nintendo products on eBay.
Oh yeah, I have heard anecdotes like this all over. What do expect these people to do? If I was making near minimum wage, I would like to think that I would be able to not do something like that, but you gotta pay rent somehow.
The happy ending is I have Epona and a green Link outfit in Breath of the Wild now. Epona is OP.