On Friday we broke the news that Gametraders was selling grey imported copies of Super Mario 3D Land just under a week ahead of the games official release date of November 24. Now, in a move that mirrors the Ocarina of Time 3D situation earlier this year, EB will sell the game as soon as it gets stock in this week.
Vooks is reporting that, similar to the Ocarina of Time 3D break, EB won’t be announcing any official street break, but will sell the game to anyone who comes into the store and asks for it directly.
Most EB stores won’t receive copies of the game until this afternoon at the earliest, most likely tomorrow, but will be selling as soon as the copies are delivered.
Earlier this year Gametraders made a bit of a stir by selling Ocarina of Time 3D early. This move was, in part a protest against the practices of local distributors and their treatment of smaller specialist retailers like Gametraders. After we broke the news that Gametraders were selling copies of Super Mario 3D Land early, Managing Director Mark Langford got in touch with us to inform us why he made the decision to sell.
“We have been advised by the official Australian distributors for Nintendo that we will not be getting any stock of the Limited Edition Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword and Nintedo will not allow supply of the eshop points cards to our stores,” he said.
“Plenty of other retailers have broken street dates in the past but In the ten years that we have been operating we have never seen any evidence of action being taken against them. From our expereince the publishers are happy to support the big multi national overseas owned corporations and the big department stores but they wont support a 100% Australian owned company whose franchisees have put their whole future on the line.
“The reason that we import some titles is to allow us to compete on price with the big players who get rebates that we cannot get and at times we will sell early where we see cases of our competitors receving an unfair competative advantage such as us not getting the limted edition Skyward Sword from the Australian distrubutor. As a result we will be importing this title.”
It’s worth noting that what Gametraders is doing is completely legal, and from that standpoint Nintendo cannot, under any circumstances, punish a retailer for selling grey imports. This is almost the exact same situation we wrote about after the Ocarina of Time break earlier this year.
We expect all other specialist retailers to follow suit and start selling the game early. Stay tuned for more details.
Exclusive: EB Games to sell Super Mario 3D Land as stock arrives [Vooks]
Leave a Reply