EB Games did people the service of announcing its latest round of pre-orders for the Nintendo Classic Mini NES, but it looks like the whole thing just backfired. Badly.
EB’s website is in a pretty bad state right now.
Update: EB Games has announced that they’ll open up pre-orders again tomorrow after their site crashed due to excessive amounts of traffic:
You can find out the rest of the details here.
The message from EB’s social media accounts seems to be pretty consistent. The site is currently experiencing insane traffic and demand so…
@vinagieerette_ Keep trying Agatha! – Dex
— EB Games Australia (@EBGamesAus) November 14, 2016
Keep trying.
But people are not happy, jan.
It appears as though EB Games wasn’t quite prepped for this level of demand. That or they’ve just gone bugger it, and let chaos reign.
@EBGamesAus Got it in the cart, can’t check out, but this doesn’t secure one for me does it?
— Liam (@gall_liam) November 14, 2016
Hey @EBGamesAus, did you guys build the census site too?
— Richard Szalay (@richardszalay) November 14, 2016
@EBGamesAus @Leirith Rubbish. Ill-prepared.
— Ian A (@IanA_Aus) November 14, 2016
@nicolehasread As you can imagine, the site is under very heavy load. Glad to hear you got to the cart.
— EB Games Australia (@EBGamesAus) November 14, 2016
I’ve seen three different error messages on @EBGamesAus so far. That’s a special brand of site failure. pic.twitter.com/3JikkVYMLR
— Seamus Byrne (@seamus) November 14, 2016
It’s looking pretty brutal out there:
Actually get to payment click confirm aaaaand… Why @EBGamesAus ? pic.twitter.com/sjBM1LIOqN
— Rhys (@Quicksilveraus) November 14, 2016
The site also appears to be dealing out multiple different error messages.
@EBGamesAus What the hell is this now? pic.twitter.com/TcgzTNh73l
— Aaron T (@RSavageDUI) November 14, 2016
@EBGamesAus why the hell can I not finish my order? I keep getting redirected to https://t.co/7udz3QskUE
— Andrew Hobbs (@gorstrom) November 14, 2016
The main issue people seem to be having: the site timing out or crashing halfway through pre-orders, meaning that customers aren’t sure whether they’ve actually secured their pre-order or not. Difficult times.
All up, you have to wonder whether this was the right call. JB Hi-Fi chucked its pre-order page up without warning, and stock was gone in seconds. EB Games has just made a large portion of its consumer base pretty angry right now.
Omgggggg @EBGamesAus 28mins and keep being redirected to ebsplash. It was in my cart ahhhhhhhh pic.twitter.com/LzP5rOfgIM
— Carolzor (@carolzor) November 14, 2016
We’ll update if we hear more.
#EBMiniNESDay pic.twitter.com/bCqNrJnYvm
— Daniel Vuckovic (@VOOK64) November 14, 2016
EDIT: Looks like we might have to wait till tomorrow.
@VOOK64 @Serrels Getting this page now on @EBGamesAus site. pic.twitter.com/uM5qkw5jUp
— Gabe (@WoomyVGC) November 14, 2016
Comments
40 responses to “The Mini NES Broke EB Games’ Website And People Are Pissed”
no way it was going to be able to handle the load
…That’s what she said…
I’ll be here all week
I got all the way to “confirming order” site goes down 🙁
Oh noes – all these scalpers who miss out buying the console for $99 and selling it for $500
My heart bleeds for you…
I want to gut the thing for a RaspPi mame system – That’s why I don’t want to pay a scalper and their mark-up
Some people kind of wanted one to own and play. Like me.
Not everyone is a scalper, some of us actually still want one 🙁
Yeah, exactly! Apart from the people who legitimately wish to purchase one with no intention of reselling it for profit, all those scalpers should go to hell. I guarantee at least a third of the traffic that brought down the website today was just shameless, money-hungry, price-gouging scalpers looking to make easy profit off the desperation of others.
ugh a lot of people actually want one. i put in my order with jb this morning and it’s going to my christmas present from my girlfriend
Wife and I have tried everytime its gone up for pre-order.
Always the same, its in the cart, get to checkout, crash, site unavailable, sold out….
The wife is pretty upset as Ive been harping on about it since it was announced, Im not that worried, but I think its more the fact that she is frustrated that she has been doing the right thing getting in on time etc and the outcome is out of her control.
Feel bad for her….
Eh, pretty dumb for anyone to not expect exactly this to happen. I got to the point of being able to confirm my address before it went down, it’ll suck if I miss out but it’s not the end of the world or anything. The stores are just dealing with it as best they can, in the end it all comes down to Nintendo just not supplying enough to go round. Direct your anger at them.
Ahahaha, “it’ll be back midday tomorrow”. So we get to do it all over again, whee!
People really need to grow up. You’ll get one eventually. Until then, stop complaining and play emulated games on PC.
Dont even need a pc or emulators, barring Super Contra and Tecmo Bowl all of the games on this thing are on the Virtual Console. Not to mention the fact the Virtual Console has more games for NES/SNES/N64 and a bunch of SEGA games, all you need is the original Wii.
Thats the issue though, people dont know that… there has been no word on if this is a limited release.
Nintendo needs to stop that
This is a solution to a problem nobody had.
If stock was sent to stores so EB could do what Target/Big W did last week on launch day, we’d no doubt see a similar issue, but at least the first come first serve basis would still apply, and you’d be able to put your name down in-store so that store could gauge real interest.
If you are the client here (that’s Nintendo, by the way), you wouldn’t be very impressed if you were promised simple and assured management of your product through your reseller to the end customer, AND THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN.
If top brass from Nintendo AU are reading this, I encourage people to let them know how disappointed they are with EB here.
You could always partner with Gametraders or Harvey Norman, Nintendo AU.
I hear they’ve loved working with you in the past.
“This is a solution to a problem nobody had.”
Perfectly put leigh.
Harvey Norman don’t have anything to do with Nintendo, not sure why.
I guess I’m gonna be ‘that guy’ and see it as a pretty crappy product myself. 30 games on it, 30 severely old games, for 100 bucks. No thanks. I would’ve thought they’d be smart enough to whack a few gb hdd in the thing, put a basic wifi system in it and allow a downloadable service for the nintendo store, to allow people to download classic NES games into it. For what it is though, I just don’t see it as value. I’m cool with others loving it, it just aint for me.
http://tinyurl.com/z9uwp54
Hahahahahahahahah that’s what it comes down to isn’t it.
I don’t get it?
Reference from the latest south park series.
You need to watch the last two seasons of South Park, they’re ‘member berries’, which parody the current fascination and obsession with nostalgia like it’s never been obsessed over before in the media and life, where everything was ‘better back in the day’. While it’s definitely been said before, it’s never been done to this degree. The member berries take the piss out of it by being a product everyone wants, a berry that sits there, talking constantly, and is delicious, constantly spewing out lines regarding pop culture like “‘Member Bespin… ‘Member Chewbacca…. ‘Member Taun Tauns…. ‘Member Hoth….” lol
Ah, I thought it was some kind of weird retarded Kirby.
I don’t think I’ve watched South Park since it used to be part of SBS’s Monday night lineup. As much as I love the show 😛 Too much effort to try and catch up on things I’ve missed.
Just watch the last 2 seasons, they’ve been magnificent 😀
I tend to agree, but for me/others this could describe the PS4 Pro.
Or really any console that’s out, and still while niche, still a ‘hot-ticket’ item.
The micro-issue here, the issue that’s being discussed, is the handling of the product in this country.
The macro-issue people seem to want to blather on about relates to decisions made in a boardroom in Japan that we can only pretend we know about.
Agree entirely re: PS4 Pro. The handling of this product in this country is nothing new for Nintendo, the old ‘lets create a false shortage to manipulate a demand’. It happened with Amiibos, it’s happened with games like Super Smash Brothers etc before. It’s Nintendos shitty way of marketing.
That’s contradictory.
Or at least, I’m reading it that way.
Either the shortage is false, or it isn’t.
The amiibo shortage was absolutely real. We went from seeing little to no stock of the initial wave(s), to bare shelves. Then, un-announced, Japanese-packaged stock started coming out of nowhere.
Again, that’s an exclusively Australian issue.
Nintendo’s not without fault here of course, but in this country there’s barely a Nintendo presence, it’s completely up to retail to administer the sales of its brand.
There’s been a failure here on the part of EB, moreso than the usual ‘lol Nintendo’ crowd would be able to understand.
I’ve got actual war stories from last week from inside stores and at the counters asking about it, and listening to others ask for it too.
I’d like to see a new article (maybe Tell Us Dammit?) dedicated only to people who tried and couldn’t get one by physically going to a store.
The amiibo shortage was only real initially when they exceeded expectations and were unprepared. Beyond that Nintendo opted not to create an excess amount to meet demand or to ship appropriate amounts of figures to stores to meet actual requests. By that point they created a shortage, declaring they were only able to create a certain amount of figures. They for example shipped ten Marios for every one Wii Fit Trainer or Marth, again creating a false shortage of figures. Granted some figures were expected to be more popular, but that gross outweighing of characters and understocking of characters plus the undersupplying of stores (in some cases one single box per store) led to the situation of Nintendo botching its release entirely. Nintendo have a history of great products but botched marketing, stemming all the way back to the NES itself (ROB anyone?). As a parent who had to go shopping for his kid, I’ve got war stories from the frontlines myself, including having to put up with douchebags buying up whole boxes of stuff infront of crowds so they could resell (no doubt will happen with this NES remake). I’m glad I’m not getting in on this one this time.
Mate.
Now I’m not going to pull out what I’ve done previously during this topic and link to 20-year-old articles about Buzz Lightyear toys, but this is starting to sound like something that should really be discussed over a cold beer, not a forum :p
Stock issues for the special drink cup or popcorn box that you can get at Marvel movies are probably a closer analogy to what I’m saying. That’s not the fault of Disney, but there’s enough dots to connect it to Disney, if you have enough time.
NES Mini is strictly one per customer, too. That probably doesn’t apply to staff though.
Why not a cold beer and a forum?
The people who I feel sorry for are the ones in the stores who are getting endless calls right now because the website and customer service lines have melted down and they can’t do a thing about it. Company decided to do it online only so you had hundreds if not thousands constantly bombarding the site until it fell over.
Ultimately what seems to be consistent worldwide is that demand for the product is vastly outstripping supply, especially for the holidays which seems to be an odd strategy for Nintendo when they really should have seen this was a winner.
I just want to know if this is a limited run thing or if they’ll continue making them. Hopefully it’s the latter, I’m happy to wait and avoid all the stress that people are going through trying to get one right now, but I don’t want to miss out either.
Oh well, in the meantime I’ll just head into target on Thursday and try my luck at getting the Mega Drive Classic.
Nintendo of America tweeted that further stock would be available up to Christmas and throughout the new year.
I don’t believe it is a limited run, Nintendo just hasn’t been crash hot lately and didn’t want to make an excess of consoles that wouldn’t sell…
Now that they know demand is high, there is no way they won’t ramp up production.
I think the biggest thing annoying a lot of people is EB’s response that this was “unprecedented.”
Really EB? You didn’t see it coming after the same thing happened last time?
“Unprecedented” – everyone with an ounce of technical knowledge knew it would happen, but they don’t get paid enough to convince management, or possibly even converse with them
Yep, in business this is considered ‘creating a demand’.
Unprecedented and un-forseen are two completely different words just fyi =)
All the angst. Why didn’t you all line up early at Big W or Target last week. I did and for an hour waiting in line talking with other gaming enthusiasts and $100 I have childhood memories punching me in the ‘LEVEL INSANITY DIFFICULTY’ nads.
So when is Kotaku going to run another article about how pre-ordering is an awful idea?
Pre-ordered months ago no problem at all.
Strangely, during this whole saga, yesterday and today, the site is responding to pings at 20-30ms. Not once did it fail to respond like a real outage/overload.
I can’t help but think that because EB have very limited numbers, as they have been saying, they have chosen to not simply close the counter saying, “all sold”. Instead, they pull this little caper to build up the hype and the urgency in time for the Nintendo Switch release.
It’s got SCAM written all over it.
I’ll buy one… eventually, from a decent retailer. EB have lost me.