A new set of amiibos went on sale yesterday at GameStop, and it was a disaster. They’re already sold out. One day later, Nintendo’s acting as though nothing happened, and fans are pissed off.
The GIF above comes courtesy of /r/amiibo, home to one of the highest concentrations of dedicated amiibo hunter and gatherers. Most of the threads are people grumbling at Nintendo.
To recap, GameStop was the first retailer to start taking order for the next “wave” of amiibos, and one figure, Ness from Earthbound, was exclusive to GameStop. Throngs of people were physically waiting in line at stores, while others patiently refreshed GameStop’s website.
Not only did GameStop’s website go down while pre-orders sold out, but real-life stores weren’t able to process customers for nearly an hour. Amiibo demand basically crashed GameStop.
Nintendo’s response? Simply Retweeting GameStop’s official statement on Twitter. That’s it.
A random GameStop employee even took time to personally apologise for what happened.
The reason there’s such demand, however, is because there isn’t much supply. You can’t walk into a store and buy whatever amiibo you please, as if you’re buying one of Nintendo’s games.
This all reached a fever pitch when Nintendo of America decided to ask fans what amiibo they were hoping to receive during the upcoming Easter holiday, which lands on Sunday.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/amiibo?src=hash
The response to Nintendo’s tweet was not kind.
Nintendo’s historically been a company that’s constrained supply to create hype around its products. Remember how long it was before the Wii was readily available? So while this isn’t new for the company, their approach continues to give me pause.
The disconnect is what bothers me, and this comes from someone who has zero intention of personally buying an amiibo anytime soon. (I’ll admit the yarn version of Yoshi is pretty cute.)
Nintendo’s tweet underscores the company’s forward-facing approach to everything about amiibos, since this all took off. Fans know how difficult it is to buy the amiibos they want, but Nintendo acts like it’s business as usual. No apologies, no acknowledgement of the frenzy.
I’m not suggesting Nintendo has to make sure everyone gets Ness, but something as simple as “Hey, sorry, we weren’t able to make enough — more are coming. Thanks!” That would go a long way.
It feels weird, and Nintendo’s guilty of this in other instances pretty recently, too. Remember what it was like to track down (or not track down) a Majora’s Mask version of the New 3DS? In both cases, a little honesty might have tempered the disappointment of Nintendo’s most loyal.
That’s probably good advice.
Comments
18 responses to “The Newest Amiibos Are Sold Out, And Fans Are Upset”
Makes me worried. We preordered ‘second issue’ amiibos for wave 4 I think it is at EB for April? Beginning to think that was a huge mistake…
What do you mean? Worried they won’t get the stock they’ve already allocated?
If you’ve already got them pre-ordered, I don’t think it’d be a problem, it hasn’t been so far. IIRC, we even got some before most of the US for the last wave (mostly due to issues with their retailer exclusivity deals being a complete disaster), Rosalina/Bowser at least.
Mainly because last wave, there were stories of the EB’s preordering Amiibos for people, then having to tell them they didn’t have the numbers to cover the preorders :\
People say Nintendo need to do more Amiibo runs, more GameCube adaptors, more New XLs & New 3DS’s and more new faceplates, and then get upset when they can’t meet demand. Nintendo are a games company, not a toy company or accessory company and they can’t just click their fingers and have enough supply appear.
However, if everybody could buy all the Amiibos they wanted, you know the craze wouldn’t be there.
Except I’m 100% confident they can push out more than they are. They’re a company. A Japanese company and they have weird business strategies.
That’s the excuse they used a while ago when people complained about Marth at the very begining (the only time I’ve heard them admit it’s an issue).
They said the amiibo’s are outsourced because they don’t make toys, so they can’t control the supply. It sounds fair.. except when you look at Skylanders, made by Activision who have made far less (i.e. almost none) toys than Nintendo in the past, yet there always seems to be a constant supply in stores.
Nintendo have the money to invest in larger production amounts if they wanted too and considering the demand, surely that would only be more profitable… but it’s Nintendo… Same logic as not porting 90% of their old games to VC (or only putting them on the Wii U/3DS, not both) or not making a console pokemon RPG/Pokemon Snap 2.
Everyone else is making pointless HD remakes left and right (God of War 3 – PS4 edition… for the 5 interested people who never played it before, you can now skip the last two and play the definitive edition of the 3rd… until next year when we release the ultimate pack with the rest) yet Nintendo, the one company people want HD remakes from (Everyone seems to want Mario Sunshine atm) isn’t really interested.
When you look at Skylanders you see a much crappier figurine, imo 😛
Well, in comparison to the Smash ones at least. The Mario Party ones look pretty garbage.
That’s not the problem. Even if a first print run were limited by materials (unlikely – it’s just plastic with a passive NFC chip in it – neither of which are in short supply as far as I know) Nintendo could easily *easily* line up second, third, fourth print runs and so on. It chooses not to. It is not unaware of the demand. It is not incompetent – it chooses to create a perception that its products are in super high demand. Whether this is a good commercial approach or not is debatable. I think it isn’t great because although it increases demand amongst rabid fans (those who will line up for hours to pre-order) there are equally those who are disappointed and disgusted and will be turned off the product altogether.
And yet those who are disappointed and disgusted will find other means obtain the said amiibo. It’s a marketing strategy, just like what Apple did with iPhone.
Thank christ we don’t have to deal with that retailer-exclusive bullshit here.
No, they just release characters in Japan/US first and we get shafted waiting instead.
Not really an issue imo. Regional release schedules are more than reasonable for a physical product.
Pre-ordered mine for Wave 3 and 4 right after their respective Directs. Glad that we don’t have retailer specific junk, so we can pre-order right away.
Dude, you say that now, but just wait. There have already been Skylanders exclusive to Target or Big W, pre-order bonuses exclusive to EB Games or JB Hifi (and GAME when it was around). It is happening, just not with amiibo (yet).
Disney Infinity do it too. Just a month or two ago, jasmine (Aladdin) was released a special pack with her+Aladdin+2 exclusive discs was only sold at Big W.
All the crystal ones from the first set were retailer exclusive too IIRC.
I believe Gold Mario was a Target exclusive, right? (I don’t collect them just thought I read that)
Glad I can just walk into EB and order the one a I want. Did that today for some of the newly announced ones. Was also proactive about possible Zelda Wii U special edition so put some money down on that too.
My store sells these damn things and Nintendo’s approach is not entirely wrong.
They did the right thing by limiting supply initially, but they have lingered doing it too long now. Now is the time they should be pumping them into stores in surplus = profit for me.
Their approach has worked in so far as there is not tons of stock sitting in stores not turning over a-la Disney Infinity.
Nintendo can piss every fan off but they’ll still begrudgingly crawl back for these figurines. Admit it. Why would they apologise for that?