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This is all about day-1 production-run planning. But what about follow-on runs? The "weird thing" about Nintendo, to me, has always been how little "greater-than-expected demand" seems to influence the supply, even on a 6-month delay. A lot of Nintendo products sit around "sold out" on Amazon for months/years/forever, despite a thriving secondary market for those same products, often with scalpers now charging higher than MSRP for the products.

For example — Amiibo. Why don't Nintendo keep pumping out Amiibo figures until the volume swamps scalpers and people can actually buy the things for $10? It's not like they're trying to create a secondary market for collectors; they want to sell these things to kids, as practical toys, in volume. So where's the volume for the popular figures?

This is so clearly Nintendo's pattern, that it was a big shock to gaming journalists when Nintendo actually decided to restart production for the NES/SNES Classic. Why is something like that such an exception?



It took nearly a year before the switch was something you could a actually buy


Really? At launch or during lockdown? I had mine on day one and they didn’t seem especially hard to buy at the time.


We had different experiences.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/nintendo-sto...

I called a few local stores every few weeks for months shortly after launch, all sold out.

Best Buy I think did have some scalper package you could buy for $500.


Looking back at my email, it seems I ordered mine in January 2017 and it arrived on March 6th.

When did you try to order?


It wasn't particularly hard to get a Switch at launch. I had one without resorting to scalpers or bots.




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